STG News
Amazon has just introduced Echo Hub, an all-new Echo device that combines the simplicity of Alexa with an eight-inch display to create a personalised, proactive, and intuitive smart home experience.
“The new Echo Hub allows customers to seamlessly and simply manage everything from daily tasks, to thousands of compatible smart home devices – all with Alexa,” said Kate Gooden, Head of Product, Amazon Alexa in Australia and New Zealand. “Customers around the world interact with Alexa tens of millions of times every hour. From triggering your favourite Routine to updating your shopping list, the Echo Hub gives Aussies more ways to experience what I think is the world’s best personal AI.”
The all-new Echo Hub is an Alexa-enabled smart home control panel, designed to give customers a simple and intuitive way to manage disparate smart home devices. It’s easy to install and features a thin, eight-inch, touch-enabled display with a customisable dashboard that makes it simple for customers to group and manage smart home devices, view multiple compatible smart home camera feeds at once, start a Routine, organise widgets, and manage volume and media streaming on your devices from one handy hub.
When not actively in use, Echo Hub seamlessly blends into the home by transitioning to an idle screen that can be personalised with a rotating collection of photos and glanceable information such as the weather and time. When a customer approaches the device, Echo Hub uses infrared technology to detect their proximity and naturally transitions the content back to the home screen.
Echo Hub can be mounted on a wall or placed on a counter with a stand accessory, includes a built-in smart home hub with support for Zigbee, Thread, Bluetooth and Matter—and it’s compatible with thousands of connected cameras, lights, locks, plugs, thermostats, speakers, and more. Echo Hub supports wireless or wired internet connectivity, with a compatible power-over-ethernet (PoE) adaptor.
Introducing Adaptive Content – a fresh home screen experience for the Echo Show range that uses on-device computer vision technology to adjust on-screen content based on a customer’s proximity to the device. With the new Adaptive Content experience, a customer positioned across the room will see content that is easily viewed from a distance—such as a large clock display—with the screen automatically transitioning to a more detailed view as they approach the device. If the customer is enrolled in visual ID, the content will also be personalised, highlighting things like a recent playlist. The new adaptive home screen also includes shortcut icons that make it easy to access most used widgets, which can be opened with just a tap.
In Australia and New Zealand, Adaptive Content will be available on the Echo Show 8 (2nd generation) next month and will roll out to other Echo Show devices next year.
Calling friends and dropping in on household members is a well-loved Alexa feature for staying in touch and helping coordinate your day to day at home. From today, it is even easier for you to connect with those that matter most. Now, you can add the Top Connections widget to your Echo Show 15 devices to easily see your favourite contacts and most frequently used devices within the household. You can quickly initiate a call or drop-in with a single-tap. This will extend to Echo Show 5, 8, and 10 in Australia and New Zealand in the coming months.
Echo devices are designed with customer privacy in mind and include multiple layers of privacy controls. The Echo Hub includes a microphone on/off button, and customers have full control over their voice recordings and can view, hear, or delete them at any time.
The Amazon Echo Hub is available now.