Amazon has just announced the Echo Show 15 at an online event. This 15.6 inch 1080P display can be set on a stand or mounted to the wall. This is the first Echo product that can use widgets, such as to-do-lists, cooking tutorials and even showcase customized pictures when it is set in portrait mode. One of the most compelling aspects about the new design is that it is basically a flat screen, instead of being bulky. It will retail for $329.99 CAD when it comes out.
The larger screen also comes into play with the new picture-in-picture feature, which allows you to view a security camera feed or Ring video doorbell while also looking at other content. Since it has HD resolution it will play content from Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video, Hulu, and others. Amazon also announced that TikTok and Sling TV support is coming to its entire line of smart displays very soon. It also has a 5-megapixel camera, Echo Show 15 is also great for video calls, or to Drop In on a loved one inside or outside of your house.
The one feature I am very bullish about is the ability to seamlessly blend into your décor by displaying full-screen pictures from Amazon Photos or alternating visuals from pre-loaded art, nature, seasonal, or travel galleries. It will be in portrait mode and can also display widgets such as the current weather outside. This is likely the sole function that I would buy this for. It is going to be available soon for $249.99.
Echo Show 15 is powered by the next-generation Amazon AZ2 Neural Edge processor, a machine learning (ML) inference engine with a quad-core scalable architecture and 22x more TOPS (trillions of operations per second) than the previous generation. Like AZ1, it’s capable of processing speech recognition on device and can also process computer vision (CV) workloads in parallel. The AZ2 architecture is custom designed by Amazon and runs ML-based speech models significantly faster than its predecessor—enabling CV algorithms that once required the immense computer power of the cloud to be processed entirely on the edge. What this means is that Echo Show 15 is able to recognize a person enrolled in visual ID and will be able to process their voice right on the device.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
