Amazon has announced a major new addition to its Echo Show series of devices. Apart from helping you choose and arrange your wardrobe, the company is adding a new capability that will allow its users to watch live streams accessed through various smart cameras scattered around the house.
The device will be able to bring in the video feed from a variety of smart cameras including the likes of Ring, Arlo, Nest, August, EZViz, Vivint, Amcrest, and IC Realtime.
Developers are also receiving access to a brand new Smart Home skill API that will let them integrate the live video capabilities inside their smart home cameras. Coming now, this piece of news should still give developers a week or so to make changes to their systems before the Show starts rolling out to customers.
The device costs somewhere around $230 and thus, is a tad more expensive than many of its peers. As such it is but natural that Amazon offers somewhat more services with its system in order to make up.
Along with doing all the regular stuff that includes the ability to talk to Alexa, play music, listen to news and weather you can also do a host of new stuff including make video calls, see the lyrics to your songs as they play, YouTube and so on.
Now for instance, users will be able to say stuff like show me the lobby, or how me the front door, to get connected to the visual feed. A handy use if you ask me.
Speaking on the topic, Darrell Sommerlatt, Software Engineer at Ring said:
Traditionally, our user experience involved customers taking out their phones and opening the app to see their video feeds. With Echo Show, we saw that we could enable customers to connect to their feeds via voice.
The same goes for a host of other security devices as well, giving users one more compelling reason to buy the Echo Show over the competition.
