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.
Someone better hack the Dash buttons to work instead!
So $10 per button, but you need to buy 2 at a time.
I’m guessing a Morse code app is forthcoming.
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.
The abuse of the word “smart” is pretty rampant. These are wireless lit buttons, nothing more.
And yeah, Jeopardy is hard to spell 😛
The button in and of itself may not be smart but having such a device attached to their platform is genius.