Amazon Echo

Show me, show me show me! Amazon's voice-activated Echo now can show you stuff as well as tell you about things. Echo can now display things like music lyrics, videos, calendar appointments and even more with a new seven inch touch screen. Amazon now has five products in its Echo lineup including Echo, Echo Lineup, etc. These "gadgets" are really getting pretty cool.

NOW - tie this into FINTECH. What if you can execute payments by voice command (in the future) over this gadget with voice biometrics utilized for security and you can simply make payments verbally? Far-fetched? We think not, and it may be closer than you think.

(Bill Taylor/CEO)

"Amazon Inc.'s voice-activated Echo speakers already tell you things. Now, they can show you stuff, too.

On Tuesday, the Seattle-based giant unveiled the Echo Show, which features a seven-inch touch screen that can pull up calendar appointments, display music lyrics, play videos and a lot more. Bloomberg reported on the new device last November. The Echo Show will cost $229 when it goes on sale in late June, $50 more than the current high-end model. The debut follows last month's introduction of the Echo Look, which can evaluate a user's wardrobe. Including the two new entrants, Amazon will have five products in the Echo lineup, all powered by the Alexa digital assistant.

Amazon's gadget business isn't about big profits; it's a way to hook consumers into the company's fast-growing retail business and get people to sign up for the lucrative Prime subscription service. Meanwhile, Amazon has managed to outflank Google, which began selling its Home device two years after the Echo debuted, and Apple, which is still working on its own Siri-based version. Amazon won't say how many Echos have been sold, but it has grabbed 70 percent of the U.S. market for voice-assisted speakers, according to eMarketer, with Google accounting for most of the rest.

In a demonstration at Amazon's San Francisco offices, the Echo Show displayed full weather forecasts, news headlines and LeBron James highlights. The company says the device will also play camera feeds from such connected devices as baby monitors and camera-equipped door bells. Services that already connect to the Echo will be able to display information—say how far an Uber is from your front door or the basic box score for a baseball game. Alexa currently supports 12,000 "skills," Amazon's term for third-party services, and over time will offer increasingly comprehensive information, such as the points scored by a specific player..."

Source: Bloomberg