Amazon Echo Dot With Clock, New Design, and AZ1 AI Chip

Amazon has given its extremely popular smart speaker a radical upgrade, in which not only the performance has been improved, but above all the design has been completely redesigned. New Echo dot with Clock and Alexa will be living in a spherical speaker with a brand new AZ1 AI chip. New Amazon Echo Dot smart speakers are inexpensive, now comes with a radically new, spherical design, powerful sound, and a Kids edition that wants to win over children with cute tiger and panda prints.

In the fourth generation, the design of the Amazon Echo Dot is being fundamentally revised for the first time; in the future, the shopping giant will be using a spherical housing. But there are also exciting innovations inside, above all the brand new Neural Engine, which is known as AZ1. 
Probably the biggest advantage of this chip is the possibility to process requests locally, which should accelerate the reaction time enormously – Amazon promises that the latency can be reduced by “several hundred milliseconds”.

In combination with improved speech recognition and higher energy efficiency, this progress should definitely make itself felt. Also, the new Echo Dot Alexa will in the future be able to take part in conversations and independently recognize when someone is talking to the digital assistant and not to another person – this eliminates the need to say “Alexa” before each command.

The Echo smart speakers will also serve as a Zigbee hub in the future, so that smart home devices can be controlled without the need for an additional bridge. The Alexa app can even make suggestions on how the energy consumption in your own house can be reduced, for example by switching off the lights when you are not at home, while the Echo should consume less power even in standby mode.

From a purely visual point of view, the Echo dot with Clock actually looks like a smaller version of the Echo, but for reasons of cost, Amazon has dispensed with the brand-new AZ1 chip, which should significantly reduce the reaction time of its big brother.

For this, the company packs a 40-millimeter loudspeaker in the small Orb, the manufacturer promises clear voices and decent bass so that you can bring full-fledged sound into every room of your home. As with the predecessor, there is again a model with an integrated clock. 

The new Kids Edition impresses with a panda or tiger print so that the small speaker looks a lot friendlier. Basically, this is the same hardware as the regular model, but parents can limit the functionality via the Alexa app. One year of Amazon Kids + subscription is included with purchase, so kids can access a variety of audiobooks, interactive games, and educational Alexa skills.

Price and availability

The Echo Dot can be pre-ordered on Amazon at prices starting at $49.99 and delivery will start on October 22nd.

The Bang & Olufsen has recently announced the Beosound A1 2nd Gen waterproof Bluetooth speaker as the world’s first smart portable Bluetooth speaker with built-in Amazon Alexa voice assistant – according to the company.