Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant is at the heart of its coolest recent product, the Echo home speaker. The virtual assistant is improving quickly to rival Siri and Cortana, with lots of useful integrations that let it control your lights, answer questions, order an Uber or adjust your house’s temperature. Amazon announced Alexa is coming to two new devices this week, the Amazon Tap and the Echo Dot. Both are interesting takes on the original Echo, designed to be used in slightly different environments.
The Amazon Tap is essentially a mobile version of the Echo, a tubular Bluetooth speaker that looks similar to the well-regarded UE Boom. This lets you take Alexa from room to room; it’s easy to imagine taking her to the kitchen at breakfast, then back to the bedroom once you’ve settled in for the night. Of course, that means you have to recharge the unit regularly, but it sounds like a fair exchange.
The Amazon Echo Dot is basically the Echo without the speakers, but still including the microphone and intelligence of Alexa. Instead, you’re meant to plug it into your existing speaker system, allowing you to listen to music or podcasts over your regular music-listening speakers, which presumably sound better than a Bluetooth-sized speaker.
The move is a sensible one from Amazon, as it’ll let their well-regarded Alexa assistant into different form factors that will suit different folks. We’ve seen similar overtures from Amazon in the past — after all, there’s the Triby speaker that will reportedly get Alexa support later this year — but it’s still nice to see Alexa’s reach expand with new first-party products.
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