You can now buy the Amazon Echo without an invite
Amazon today announced that you no longer need an invitation to buy the Amazon Echo. In case you don’t remember what this thing is, it’s a $180 personal assistant speaker that’ll feed you the information you crave by simply speaking. It’s a ubiquitous model, meaning it’s always listening and waiting for your commands.
Derek has been using his for quite some time, and he’s been pretty pleased with it. Alexa — the name of the artificial intelligence being running the show behind the scenes — can deliver news, read your messages out loud, tell you the weather, play music read your books and more. It does so with an extra sensitive microphone and loud speakers, too, so you can issue commands from across the room and hear the result with ease.
The one feature Amazon’s keen on is its everlasting connection to the cloud, which is how it’s always up to date about news and weather, as well as why it’s always gaining new features and functionality without you having to do much. Just hook it up to the internet and you’ll probably never have to touch the thing again.
Unfortunately the units won’t ship until July 14th, but at least we’re finally assured that a retail release is happening. Be sure to place an order right here if this sounds like something you could use.
[via Amazon]