Amazon’s Echo speakers are designed to be controlled by voice. Sure, they have a few buttons for adjusting volume, but basically the idea is that you speak to the Alexa voice assistant and it responds by voice.

But now Amazon is launching a new way to interact with Alexa… a Bluetooth button called the Echo Button.

It’s basically positioned as a wireless button that you can press while playing trivia games like Jeopardy or Trivial Pursuit with an Echo. So it makes sense that Amazon is selling the Echo button in 2-packs. You’ll be able to buy a pack for $20 later this year.

While games will likely be some of the first Alexa skills to make use of the Echo Buttons, I can’t help but wonder if developers will come up with other uses for them.

Amazon is releasing an API that developers can use to add Button support, and we’ve seen developers and hackers get creative with other cheap gadgets released by Amazon in the past.

Thanks to a series of recent leaks, we had a pretty good idea that Amazon was working on some new hardware. But I honestly did not see this particular gadget coming.

Speaking of gadgets, apparently the Echo Buttons are “the first of many” new devices designed to work with Alexa. Amazon calls this new product category Alexa Gadgets.

via Amazon and Engadget

 

 

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers

6 replies on “Amazon Echo Button is a $20 smart button for Echo speakers”

  1. This is very clever. Google coming into the market has clearly been good. Amazon has clearly found another gear in response. This kind of fight is not Google’s strong suit. They usually seem to think the long game will come to them in the end. I think they better find another gear themselves.

  2. The abuse of the word “smart” is pretty rampant. These are wireless lit buttons, nothing more.

    And yeah, Jeopardy is hard to spell 😛

    1. The button in and of itself may not be smart but having such a device attached to their platform is genius.

Comments are closed.