Encounter with Amazon Echo

By nature, I try to get my hands on most of the new product launches, more to exercise my view as a critique and designer. I often bump into products with a black screen like mobile, tablet, laptop, TV and what not. It seems like there is a race to put the black screen into every product possible in the name of the internet of things (IOT) or connected devices. On the aesthetic side, I don’t see much evolution from the previous generation black screen products though I found the lot of emphasis on speed, user interface, and user experience, but nothing revolutionary from quite some time.

The launch of Amazon Echo in 2014 was a surprise to me as this is the product, which moves away from the black screen. As a matter of fact, the whole product is black. In the first promo video, it seemed to be a product that’s trying to find a niche which doesn’t exist. I was very skeptical as I had used voice-enabled services in the past like Siri and a similar speech to text engine, and I believed there is still a long way to go before a product can survive solely on voice-enabled interaction.

It was the only end of 2015 when I actually laid my hands on Amazon Echo and I must say what a pleasant surprise. Unboxing was very simple as there were not many layers of packaging, unlike typical Apple products. Out of the box, you see this big, bulky, black cylinder, which should always be plugged in and be connected to Wi-Fi to work. I always look up to Amazon’s product launches and am a big fan of kindle and fire tablet which I see as the best value for money. As a product designer, it seemed to me as a very traditional design where function dominates the form. The engineer inside me was very curious to experiment with it and amazon voice service (AVS) has opened a whole world of possibilities in front of me.

Within a day, Alexa sneakily became an integral part of our family. I mostly use it to play music, my wife to make her shopping list and my son to try his luck to get answers of all of his questions, which are certainly beyond the limits of Google, forget about Alexa. Time and again, I get frustrated when I have to repeat myself or shout at the top of my voice to get heard correctly, but it is still the best voice enabled device I have come across.

Echo comes across as a device which belongs to the whole family, not to an individual. Perhaps television is another actively shared device but it throws a plethora of options in front of us, which creates debates on what to see and whose demand to succumb to. However with Echo, we hardly have such a fight. Alexa no doubts lack AI, but still my wife will say, “We ask so many questions to Alexa, I fear she might be angry one day”. There is a very high perceived sociability of the device.

I have added quite a few custom interactions using Alexa voice services like reading stories for my son, and it is just amazing. Voice enabled services are the way to go and I am sure Echo is setting a new benchmark in this direction. There is a whole new level of user interface and user experience to explore as you don’t see what you are doing but something is happening as per your command in real time. At times, I hate my phone as it is too intrusive, it distracts me by nudging me to do the lot of stuff which I don’t want to do at a given time. For example, I pick my phone to call my friend but end up spending time considerable time looking at all the notifications which often leaves me frustrated. However, Echo does what I ask it does, keeping me immune to the immense possibilities of things I can ask. I like it for the very reason that it doesn’t have a screen.

From the design perspective, Black cylinder looks no-brainer to me in terms of industrial design as cylinder would be the first obvious shape which I will come up if I have to stuff speaker, base, and booster which are mostly in the circular in shape in a device. But when you hold echo into your hand, it gives a feeling of robustness and quality. There is a lot I wish echo should have – it should be smarter, it shouldn’t abruptly say that it didn’t understand the instruction and instead, it should provide options to get the task done as well as keeping me engaged if I want to. I really wish It could take multiple instructions and process them very quickly. I know that in the future, Echo will be able to do much more than what I wish for.

Today Echo sits comfortably in our living room, plays the right music during dinner time, helps me to have an awesome conversation with my family, and above all, keeps me away from my phone when I should be.