Amazon is the most ceaselessly inventive company of the era. This, employees say, is one of the great virtues of working there; you can introduce a product without a million meetings or its being focus-grouped to death. Nor does Amazon seem hugely protective of the Amazon brand, which also speeds up innovation. It is not afraid of being disliked.
Last week the retailer released a new piece of hardware called Echo. Unlike, say, the Amazon phone, Echo was not preceded by months of rumors. It just showed up and, like many things Amazon, immediately started generating debate.
Echo is basically Amazon’s answer to Siri, the virtual iPhone assistant. Unlike Siri, however, Echo is a stationary device, a cylinder parked in your living room or kitchen or bedroom — or perhaps all three. It answers questions, tells jokes, plays music, serves as an alarm clock, takes shopping orders and in general becomes a buffer between family members who cannot talk to one another. In a promotional video, Echo had aspects of both Mary Poppins and HAL, the computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” with perhaps a touch of “The Matrix.”
“Play rock music,” the boy in the video commands. And Echo does. “Stop!” says his father — speaking to the machine, not his son.
The daughter, baiting her brother, asks the device to define “annoying.”
“Add wrapping paper to the shopping list,” the mother says while cooking, and then asks, “How many teaspoons are in a tablespoon?” The son asks the father how to spell cantaloupe, which Dad cannot do, so he must ask the machine. Echo also informs Dad it is not really Saturday, as he insists, but Thursday, and so he must get out of bed.
All requests of Echo are prefaced by a “wake” word, which gets Echo going. What is not clear, commentators immediately pointed out, is how it ever goes off — or whether people would even want it to. “With everything Echo can do,” the daughter says approvingly, “it’s really become part of the family.”
Some viewers of the video were appalled. “The dystopian world of the Echo advertisement is a near future (really, a present) in which no one knows anything, and everyone relies on a humanoid device to mediate their most intimate personal interactions — between parent and child, between husband and wife, between brother and sister,” Jonathan Sherman-Presser wrote in a popular LinkedIn post. “Implicit in this picture is that the family portrayed has accepted this as a worthwhile trade-off for the utility the Echo affords them.”
Mr. Sherman-Presser concluded that he found himself wondering: “What is Amazon’s vision of the role that technology plays in society? And what is its view of the world we live in — and would want to live in?”
The clear implication was that Amazon’s view was a bleak one, where people are reduced to creatures of consumption. But in the hundreds of comments the post got, more than a few people responded by saying: I want to live in that world right now.
“I just showed this to a few of my tech friends at our office and everyone is in agreement that this looks pretty sweet,” one person wrote. “I mean…necessary? No…but something that will eventually become commonplace.”
A woman wrote, “I’m already envisioning Echo as a member of my family.”
The most surprising response speculated that the ad was cringeworthy on purpose: “The video portrays well the features and benefits of the device, while also giving viewers a pleasant feeling of superiority over the characters. The ad is poised to go viral (and you helped) thanks to its quirkiness.”
How well does Echo work? Who knows? Amazon is not sending out review units, and even to buy an Echo you have to apply. The introductory price is $99 for Amazon Prime members.
Echo follows on the heels of Dash, an electronic wand, and the ill-fated Fire phone as another device that promotes and facilitates shopping on Amazon. It is also the most omnipresent. The Echo fine print notes that after hearing the “wake” word — “Alexa,” in the video — Echo “streams audio to the cloud, including a few seconds of audio before the wake word.” So in some sense, it is listening all the time.
Every consumer tech company wants to get into the smart home; it is the last frontier, the place where we are the most relaxed and thus the most vulnerable. The risk for Amazon is that Echo may end up being too early, as the Forrester analyst James McQuivey wrote in a note, “setting the table for a party that consumers aren’t ready to join.”