"Day 1 Editions are designed to bring you our most innovative ideas faster. By choosing to participate, you’ll have the opportunity to contribute feedback that informs future product ideas and development."
So compared to for example Apple, they are taking a different approach with this product.
No one is being made to do anything, but if you want to be a beta tester, you have to actually buy the thing. They aren't giving it away for you to test with. And you have to be invited, apparently.
> Sounds like they're making people pay to be beta testers.
Kind of the point. If people aren't willing to part with their hard earned dollars for the device, maybe it won't be a market success and they should stop investing in it?
This is actually a pretty clever way to get early feedback on new ideas.
And the people who say "you have to pay for this stuff". Um yeah, that is the point. If nobody buys it.... maybe that is a clue there is no market for the idea (at least at that price point).
Neat! Too bad the discussion is about this particular device and not the actual program itself...
I think it's more that Amazon has so much money that their version of market research looks much different than what you typically think of as market research.
Producing a new device, throwing it up on their website to sell, and seeing how well it does is Amazon's version of market research. It's "move fast and break things" brought into the hardware space. They actually even say as much in their description of the "Day 1 Editions" program, of which the Echo Loop is part of.
The "move fast and break things" motto doesn't mean actually "breaking" things. It means not being afraid of mistakes, because things that are "broken" or "wrong" can be fixed down the line.
In this case, Amazon is exhibiting not being afraid of releasing a possibly unsuccessful product, because they know they can iterate on it (or pivot, or exit entirely) later on.
This product is part of Amazon's "Day One" program, which is largely stuff that they're throwing against the (shopping) wall to see if it sticks. It's like the Alexa Microwave...a shitty microwave that was intended as a reference design that became the best-selling microwave on Amazon.
Amazon is testing the waters for Alexa-integrated wearables. Not just earbuds, which are a saturated market, but other wearables like rings and frames.
If it does, the potential upside is huge--they could create an entire new market, like they did with the original Echo and Kindle. If not, it's a rounding error in an immaterial account on the financials.
Remember the failed phone? Half of these new echo devices likely will suffer the same fate. I can’t imagine wanting to speak to my hand or my glasses in public... looking completely insane while doing it.
It is clear to me that Amazon has doubled down on the only foothold they have, after missing mobile.
I think that Voice Assistants will always be a feature, though, and not a product. And as a feature, first-party ones will always have an inherent advantage.
Especially with this event, it seems that Amazon is going with a feature and trying to back into products, which to me seems like the opposite way to approach a market.
Do you have a source for that claim? Because I also rather rarely play music through mine. Most people I know who have one use it mainly for smart home control.
Yeah, I would love to have some data on that too. We have a few HomePods around the house, and even though that is more of a music player than a smart speaker, we use the voice assistant for everything BUT music.
Music is usually controlled with our phones or computers, casted to the HomePods.
So... it's a clock. Except one that you have to talk to, instead of just looking at it.
I have a mantle clock for that. Every 30 minutes a gentle chime drifts through the house, keeping everyone on time. No charging. No shouting. No telemetry. No privacy invasion involved.
I have one of the Google Home devices in every room in the house. The speakers for the bathroom/bedroom and the video screens for the living room and kitchen. It's amazing. I can tell it to play music synchronized across the house, I have photos of fun stuff scrolling in my living spaces, and I ask it for calendar, transit, and weather advice daily.
Plus, it's so far superior to a clock in that I can get in bed and say "Set alarm for 6.30" or "Wake me up in 9 hours" or whatever I want and I can snooze it from bed or stop the alarm without needing to find a button.
While I had one, I mostly used it for: 1) playing music that can be named in English (because fuck other languages, right?), 2) setting timers, 3) checking the time.
I find voice assistants to be of very limited use to me. Generally, I prefer typing, because it's just faster. When I find myself needing a voice assistant, it's because I'm: 1) not near enough a keyboard, and/or 2) using my hands for something else, namely cooking or driving. Back when I had Echo Dot, it wasn't really useful for cooking, other than setting timers. And, of course, I couldn't take it with me in my car. I don't know if they made it more useful in the last couple of years.
I think voice assistants could be extremely useful, but they're being hampered by their creators' ambition. Every single voice assistant I've seen is trying too hard to be "everything you'll ever need", so it could dominate the market.
I had hopes for Mycroft II, because it promised to be an open source solution on par with other voice assistants. It turned to be a typical Kickstarter horror story: overpromised and not yet delivered.
More case of Voice Assistants are a front-end to services and Amazon sells services, so saturation of that market works best for them. So with mobiles, why not sell services for all those ecosystems and with that target more people across all flavours of mobiles.
Win the interface (Voice Assistant) battle and your have a massive advantage in the services that will just work compared to services that take some hacking about. Want to play Amazon music upon alexa - done, want to play Google Play Music using Alexa - let me write some code, setup a service.....effort. Most users want simple, easy, just works and if they can win that battle, then that is a far bigger market than mobiles. Bit like - why focus on selling a form of car when we can sell fuel to all the cars and they want to win that market.
Maybe the whole Voice Assistant market may go like the whole VHS/Betamax market did, cheap, works and may be better offerings but market saturations wins in the end.
Amazon is in constant development of secret projects to throw at the wall and see what sticks. Having worked on their hardware teams they’re constantly reverse engineering products and engineering new potential items that seem kinda out there or anticipating filling a market need that doesn’t yet exist. Swing enough times you’ll get some hits.
My main thing with this is it kind of works well for digital minimalism - no need for notifications or tracking of my body but get the benefit of adding to-dos or looking up quick things without looking at a screen.
I hate smart watches cause I wear a normal watch, you know, something i never have to charge and is always on, amazing concept and I don't want to constantly be pulling out my phone, I prefer to keep it in a bag. This kind of gets that middle ground of answering quick one off questions (which I use my Google Home for now, but not out and about) as well as add to-dos and other things. Connecting this with Ifttt can probably do other cool stuff to.
Though, this is not a mass market need, it just happens to fill my specific need.
I don't know how to feel about this. On one side are the privacy implications.
On the other hand, 16 year old me would have loved this. This is the pervasive computing of sci-fi made real. All information is just a tap away. Control lights or run a compute job using a custom Alexa Skill.
Sci-fi also showed us the risks of such things, if not implemented properly. STtNG had several episodes where the U.S.S. Enterprise was commandeered via voice hacks.
Currently I use a ring that allows me to pay like a credit card: I love it (I live by the beach so I prefer not to have a wallet with me).
Being able to query google from a ring is attractive to me.
I am surprised by the fact the speaker is in the ring, but it means you can potentially receive “private” information from the ring without other hearing.
I imagine people whispering to their rings in the bus. I think the hand motion you have to do from speaking to listening might make you look like a fool (google glass)
Is this an early April Fool's joke? The video showing people interacting with the ring does not remotely look appealing or cool. I'm surprised this went through all the way to actual production.
I've lived in places that were cold for a decent period each year and I wasn't wearing gloves all the time. Even 2-3% of my time would be a stretch.
Even in cold countries we spend ~90% of our time inside and much of the ~10% outside in decent weather. The average American spends 7% of their day outside with some obvious outliers push that upwards. The world average is 87% inside. [1]
Plenty of products are only used a few times a day. I don't think the downtime spent walking around outside shopping or commuting is the killer.
The question is are there enough of those uses to justify wearing it all the time. Not if it works in 100% of situations.
Why build any electronic device that cannot withstand scorching temperatures, extreme cold, function in the deep ocean? There is clearly no market unless it does those things. /s
That's more than 2/3 the population of France, 3/5 the population of Germany, and 1/6 the population of the US.
Apple earbuds may not work great around the world but it's decent product for those 50 million people, and based on social media appears to work well for other people in similarly temperate climates, like southern Europe, Australia, etc.
I would honestly probably use this if it were something like a tiny, unobtrusive, nearly-flat adhesive which I could stick to my hand or arm. Tie it in with some subtle bone-conduction headphones and I'd probably use it while outdoors. For example, it'd be awesome if it could do, say, or play certain things based on a sequence of taps which I can configure, like with Alexa Routines; saying "Alexa, resume podcast" out loud in public is a no-go. Make it thought-controlled and I'd use it without a doubt.
I suspect this is just a kludgy initial version of some future thing that could eventually become really popular.
I've been watching all of today's Echo announcement threads wondering the same thing. If any of these products -- with /maybe/ the exception of the earbuds -- were posted on April Fools, we'd have chuckled and moved on without a thought.
> The video showing people interacting with the ring does not remotely look appealing or cool.
Why does it have to look cool? I want an assistant/gadget whatever that goes out of the way and that I don't have to think about. Ideally it would be invisible, weightless and require no maintenance or charging.
Oh damn! They should have made it in the shape of tiny angels and demons micro drones which hover over your shoulder. You ask a question and you get an assortment of positive and negative responses from them as they flutter and follow you around your shoulders.
That...could be quite handy for the elderly. Spend some time as a caregiver and you see that a lot of these oddball form factors are quite handy for some folks.
I can see the appeal of everything else Amazon announced (even the glasses, which have value in that they're basically headphones you don't have to take off when having a conversation). But cannot figure out the target market of this. I'm even someone who is interested in the idea of a smart ring, but the feature it needs is sleep tracking (since I haven't ever been able to sleep with a watch or band).
I could see some use in fitness tracking when playing a sport where you'd be asked to take off a watch (pickup basketball, for example). But that's why I think there could be a market for it - its value prop is simply that it's both extremely low profile and connected. The Oura ring is simply too expensive for me, but I think I'd pay $130 for a wearable sleep tracker that integrates with Apple Health that provided me high quality data about my sleep quality.
I do wonder what else does it pick up. This seems to be a voice version of facebook scanning faces of all random people on pictures taken in public and posted to facebook.
87 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadyou know - who is out there saying - what i am missing in my life is a really ugly ring, that i have to charge daily.
So compared to for example Apple, they are taking a different approach with this product.
No one is being made to do anything.
Kind of the point. If people aren't willing to part with their hard earned dollars for the device, maybe it won't be a market success and they should stop investing in it?
Or even Google... like with their Google Glasses.
This is actually a pretty clever way to get early feedback on new ideas.
And the people who say "you have to pay for this stuff". Um yeah, that is the point. If nobody buys it.... maybe that is a clue there is no market for the idea (at least at that price point).
Neat! Too bad the discussion is about this particular device and not the actual program itself...
It's what happens when a company has so much money it can make things without doing any actual market research.
"More dollars than sense" is the appropriate expression.
Producing a new device, throwing it up on their website to sell, and seeing how well it does is Amazon's version of market research. It's "move fast and break things" brought into the hardware space. They actually even say as much in their description of the "Day 1 Editions" program, of which the Echo Loop is part of.
In this case, Amazon is exhibiting not being afraid of releasing a possibly unsuccessful product, because they know they can iterate on it (or pivot, or exit entirely) later on.
Amazon is testing the waters for Alexa-integrated wearables. Not just earbuds, which are a saturated market, but other wearables like rings and frames.
If it does, the potential upside is huge--they could create an entire new market, like they did with the original Echo and Kindle. If not, it's a rounding error in an immaterial account on the financials.
(Granted I wouldn't wear this for privacy reasons, but I really dislike wearing watches)
I think that Voice Assistants will always be a feature, though, and not a product. And as a feature, first-party ones will always have an inherent advantage.
Especially with this event, it seems that Amazon is going with a feature and trying to back into products, which to me seems like the opposite way to approach a market.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/25/20882636/amazon-echo-stud...
Music is usually controlled with our phones or computers, casted to the HomePods.
- I use mine exclusively for music.
- My mom uses hers for a mix of home automation and music, but seems to be heavier toward the latter. Sometimes she'll play Jeopardy with it.
- My grandparents use theirs exclusively for home automation.
I have a mantle clock for that. Every 30 minutes a gentle chime drifts through the house, keeping everyone on time. No charging. No shouting. No telemetry. No privacy invasion involved.
Best $7 I've spent in a long time.
Plus, it's so far superior to a clock in that I can get in bed and say "Set alarm for 6.30" or "Wake me up in 9 hours" or whatever I want and I can snooze it from bed or stop the alarm without needing to find a button.
I find voice assistants to be of very limited use to me. Generally, I prefer typing, because it's just faster. When I find myself needing a voice assistant, it's because I'm: 1) not near enough a keyboard, and/or 2) using my hands for something else, namely cooking or driving. Back when I had Echo Dot, it wasn't really useful for cooking, other than setting timers. And, of course, I couldn't take it with me in my car. I don't know if they made it more useful in the last couple of years.
I think voice assistants could be extremely useful, but they're being hampered by their creators' ambition. Every single voice assistant I've seen is trying too hard to be "everything you'll ever need", so it could dominate the market.
I had hopes for Mycroft II, because it promised to be an open source solution on par with other voice assistants. It turned to be a typical Kickstarter horror story: overpromised and not yet delivered.
Win the interface (Voice Assistant) battle and your have a massive advantage in the services that will just work compared to services that take some hacking about. Want to play Amazon music upon alexa - done, want to play Google Play Music using Alexa - let me write some code, setup a service.....effort. Most users want simple, easy, just works and if they can win that battle, then that is a far bigger market than mobiles. Bit like - why focus on selling a form of car when we can sell fuel to all the cars and they want to win that market.
Maybe the whole Voice Assistant market may go like the whole VHS/Betamax market did, cheap, works and may be better offerings but market saturations wins in the end.
I hate smart watches cause I wear a normal watch, you know, something i never have to charge and is always on, amazing concept and I don't want to constantly be pulling out my phone, I prefer to keep it in a bag. This kind of gets that middle ground of answering quick one off questions (which I use my Google Home for now, but not out and about) as well as add to-dos and other things. Connecting this with Ifttt can probably do other cool stuff to.
Though, this is not a mass market need, it just happens to fill my specific need.
On the other hand, 16 year old me would have loved this. This is the pervasive computing of sci-fi made real. All information is just a tap away. Control lights or run a compute job using a custom Alexa Skill.
Being able to query google from a ring is attractive to me.
I am surprised by the fact the speaker is in the ring, but it means you can potentially receive “private” information from the ring without other hearing.
I imagine people whispering to their rings in the bus. I think the hand motion you have to do from speaking to listening might make you look like a fool (google glass)
Too bad it looks to be UK only.
It's yet another SV bubble "innovation" that's only useful on the west coast.
It's not going to work in half the world for half of the year. Winter. Pockets. Gloves.
See also: Apple EarPods, with the cords that get brittle in cold weather and become useless tangles that fly up in your face.
See also: Every iPhone I've ever owned which has gone into emergency thermal shutdown just because I dared to use it in Arizona or Nevada.
Even in cold countries we spend ~90% of our time inside and much of the ~10% outside in decent weather. The average American spends 7% of their day outside with some obvious outliers push that upwards. The world average is 87% inside. [1]
Plenty of products are only used a few times a day. I don't think the downtime spent walking around outside shopping or commuting is the killer.
The question is are there enough of those uses to justify wearing it all the time. Not if it works in 100% of situations.
1. https://www.creditdonkey.com/time-spent-outdoors-statistics....
That's more than 2/3 the population of France, 3/5 the population of Germany, and 1/6 the population of the US.
Apple earbuds may not work great around the world but it's decent product for those 50 million people, and based on social media appears to work well for other people in similarly temperate climates, like southern Europe, Australia, etc.
I suspect this is just a kludgy initial version of some future thing that could eventually become really popular.
Why does it have to look cool? I want an assistant/gadget whatever that goes out of the way and that I don't have to think about. Ideally it would be invisible, weightless and require no maintenance or charging.
Been looking to try some new IoT stuff.