Another day, another new product. Amazon has been working on its new product, the Amazon Echo. It’s a cylinder shaped device, loaded with a 360 degree speaker, far field voice recognition technology, and a subwoofer for deeper sound.

Some of the key features of Echo include: easy setup, fast Wi-Fi, Bluetooth enabled, and automatic updates. The Echo also has voice recognition technology, similar to Siri, called Alexa.

Just like Siri, you can simply use Alexa for:

• Weather and news updates
• Playing music from Amazon Music Library, Amazon Prime music, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio
• Alarm, timers, and to-do lists
• Answering questions: recieve information from Wikipedia and other sources

Alexa is the Echo’s wake word, but if you want to change it, you can. You have many other options to connect to the Echo including through Bluetooth and WiFi.

The “Oh-Yess” of the Echo: It’s very simple to use. Also, it recognizes your voice from anywhere in the room. Simply, tell Alexia what to do!

The “Oh-Noo” of the Echo: The speaker doesn’t sound great with higher volumes. Also, it must be plugged in at all times.

As Abraham Sihweil, the student support specialist at Niles North, said, “The Amazon Echo seems to be and up and coming voice activated system that is competing with the likes of Apple’s Siri and Google Now. While the price is attractive, not sure if there is need, need, need, need for it…. sorry.  Echo affect :)”.