What Happened
Following its Super Bowl campaign for Echo, Amazon is doubling down on its smart loudspeaker by expanding the product line. The company unveiled two new variations of Echo on Wednesday: the $130 Amazon Tap, an Alexa-enabled, battery-powered portable bluetooth speaker, and the $90 Echo Dot, a mini-speaker that adds Alexa support to other speakers. Curiously, the Echo Dot is currently available for pre-ordering only through Alexa, which means you would have to already have an Echo or a Alexa-enabled Fire TV to get one. In related news, Alexa will also start supporting smart thermostats from Nest and Honeywell later this month.
What Brands Need To Do
As Amazon pushes for Echo and, more importantly, Alexa presence in every room of the house, it creates an omnipresent convenience that should create more use cases for brands to explore. Diversifying its product line with different price tiers should also help with Echo’s adoption rate, furthering the proliferation of conversational interfaces. For brands, this kind of interface presents new challenges in discovery because they only present limited options upon requests. Therefore, brands should be proactive in experimenting with voice-activated devices via deep integrations or partnerships.
For more information on how brands can utilize Echo and other conversational interfaces to reach customers, check out the Conversational Interfaces section in our Outlook 2016.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Header image courtesy of Amazon’s YouTube video
