Amazon turns its most capable smart speaker into a smart camera, too
Ars Technica Scharon Harding ● Covered by 4 sources
Amazon’s new Echo Studio adds a built-in camera. It’s the same speaker at heart, but now it can watch the room too.
Based on reporting by Ars Technica, Scharon Harding — read the original for the full story.
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Amazon built the original Echo Studio for one thing: better sound from an Alexa speaker. The new version keeps that pitch, but adds an integrated camera and a new name to match: Echo Studio with Home Camera.
The audio side looks mostly unchanged. Both versions use a 3.75-inch high-excursion woofer and three full-range drivers, and both support Dolby Atmos plus Amazon’s own algorithm for creating a surround-sound effect from stereo audio. Amazon also lists lossless HD audio, Advanced Room Adaptation, and tools meant to reduce noise distortion on both speakers.
That new room-tuning feature got its own announcement today. Amazon says Advanced Room Adaptation “continuously tunes the sound to your space, automatically adapting to the room's acoustics.” It’s a tidy promise, and one that suggests the company is still trying to squeeze more life out of the same basic speaker design.
Under the hood, the two models are also aligned. Each has a four-microphone array and Amazon’s AZ3 Pro processor, which the company introduced a year ago. That chip includes an AI accelerator for Alexa+, Amazon’s generative AI chatbot. So the real story here is not audio evolution. It’s Amazon folding another sensor into a premium speaker and blurring the line between something that plays music and something that keeps an eye on the room.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Amazon keeps turning speakers into household nodes, and of course it does. A better tweeter is nice; a built-in camera is the kind of upgrade that says the company cares more about presence in the home than about hi-fi purity. That’s the modern smart-home playbook: less appliance, more surveillance with a friendly voice.
Read more about this at: Ars Technica
