Amazon announced so many new hardware products last week that it’s hard to know which one will respond the next time you shout “Alexa!” in your house. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Alexa-equipped microwave[1] sucked up a lot of the (electromagnetic) air in the room: not only does the $60 microwave work indirectly with Alexa, but it knows when you’re running out of popcorn.
But the most interesting home product to emerge from the pile of Echo products last week wasn’t the microwave. It was the new Echo Show. It’s a glimpse of Amazon’s vision for the TV of the future—whether that’s streaming video, over-the-air television, or casual games played on a large screen.
Amazon first released the Echo Show[2] in June of 2017. The two-in-one gadget combines a smart speaker and a display; the first one had a flat, rectangular face and a thick lower half, where the speakers were housed. And yet it found a welcome place on my kitchen countertop. On the tubular Echo speakers that shipped before the Show, Alexa was disembodied, a floating voice that responded in pleasant tones even when you shouted from another room. With the Echo Show, Alexa suddenly had a face.
When you use your voice to set a timer, the countdown appears on the Echo Show’s screen. When you ask Alexa to play a video, it appears right there on the display (provided it’s not a YouTube video, since Google pulled YouTube videos from Amazon products last year). The home screen cycles through a series of news updates and teasers. It’s not a perfect gadget, and some people find the Echo Show’s front-facing camera creepy—but it’s infinitely more useful than the outfit-judging Echo Look[3], Amazon’s...