Sure, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Voice Search were there, and Microsoft had the Kinect, but the concept for Echo was fundamentally different in that it had no screen for users to interact with. And in the wake of the high-profile failure of Amazon's smartphone, the industry rumors that circulated for years about a speaker product languishing within Amazon's labs seemed like more confirmation that the ecommerce giant lacked the chops to create a game-changing hardware device.Īmazon introduced two new Echo products recently called the Echo Dot, left, and Amazon Tap.Įcho’s biggest challenge was that there was no product of its kind in the market to refer to. The gadget was stuck in Amazon's in-house labs for years, subject to the perfectionist demands of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and lengthy internal debates about its market appeal. Since that time, the Echo has emerged as Amazon's sleeper hit, a hot-selling gadget that's being hailed as the standard-bearer for an entirely new computing paradigm in which Amazon suddenly has an edge on rivals such as Apple and Google.īut the Echo's path into consumers' homes was hardly a sure thing. The reaction was understandable given the lofty goals outlined in the Echo's original plan: It envisioned an intelligent, voice-controlled household appliance that could play music, read the news aloud and order groceries - all by simply letting users talk to it from anywhere in the house. But it would require a lot of inventions.'

'This is going to be hard,' Limp recalls thinking. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

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