Amazon’s Echo Hub: A Smart Home Control Panel for Your Smart Home Designed to be Responsive, Fast, and Powerful
My greatest concern is whether the Echo Hub can match the power and speed of these devices. A control panel needs to be responsive and fast so that it can do so much more. Limp says it’s as fast as the new Echo Show 5; whether this will be fast enough, we’ll have to wait and see. If it is, it will be a compelling product.
Instead of a camera, the Echo Hub has an IR sensor that it uses to wake up as you approach, so there’s no need to tap once and then tap again to activate any of the smart home widgets on the touch screen — such as turning on the lights or viewing a security camera.
The Echo Hub will have a wall-mount bracket, power adapter, and six-foot cable when it’s available to pre-order later this year. Amazon will sell wooden, white, and metallic frames for $19.99 each, and a stand for $29.99.
The widgets include icons or larger group tiles for your favorite devices, cameras, climate, locks, and security (arming or disarming a Ring security system). Along the side of the screen, you can make it your own, and along the side of the panels, there is a rooms panel for you to use to gain access to different rooms in the house.
Source: Amazon’s newest Echo is a touchscreen controller for your smart home
The Amazon Map View Interface: How you can set up smart lights at your fingertips without scrolling through device lists and response times compared to Alexa and other devices
The company worked hard to bring down the lag between when you tap on the screen and when the device responds. He says that the locally connected devices respond very quickly, asfast as a light switch.
Built-in speakers and a microphone array allow for two-way audio to talk to anyone at your video doorbell or via Drop In with Echo devices. You can also use Alexa voice control, listen to audio, or watch video. Limp says it will support Prime Video, Hulu, and Tubi, “among others,” at launch.
Limp says Amazon designed this device for its “best customer,” those with 20 or more connected smart home devices who perhaps find it all a bit too much to manage scrolling through endless device lists in the Alexa app.
The Brilliant smart home control panel has the same functions but is at a much higher price point. These devices are expensive, but it is not wrong. They can be in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars in the pro-installation range.
The new Map View interface option lets you create a digital version of your home’s floor plan, which can be pinned to each room, and then control them individually by tapping on them.
“It’s super fun,” says Limp. “If I want to change the thermostat, I just tap on it, and the controls just pop up. If I want to zoom into the upper floor and turn on a bedroom light, I can just tap and get the controls to dim it or do whatever. It’s a different paradigm; it’s really interesting.”
Amazon isn’t the first to do this — Samsung has a map interface for its SmartThings platform available on its smart monitors and 2022 TVs and newer, and the approach clearly makes a lot of sense. It means you don’t have to remember the exact name of the light to the right of the sofa; you can see it and tap on it.
The Alexa Map View will be available in the US later this year through the Alexa app — but only on compatible lidar-equipped iOS devices (Pro and Max models from the iPhone 12 and newer) at launch. It is going to be at the Echo Hub in the early 2020s.
I found it to be okay but inconsistent to set up smart lights with the new features on them, such as the Alexa Routines and the ultrasound sensor. Fingers crossed the combination of signals this feature could leverage will help boost reliability.
Automatic lighting can be tailored to suit your needs, no setup required. For example, you can specify the level of brightness that will trigger the lights to turn on and set the time of day you want it to work and the lights that it will control.
Of course, you can currently set up routines like this using Alexa’s Routines, but again, those can be fiddly to fine-tune to fit in perfectly with your daily movements. Whether automatic lighting manages to overcome this roadblock will be interesting to see.
The Ring app will soon carry the featured routines from Amazon. These are prepopulated Alexa Routines designed to show users how to get the most out of their devices. They are also available in the Ring app based on your Ring devices.
These will include things like turning off lights when you set your Ring Alarm to Away mode, turning on your porch light when someone rings your doorbell, or having Alexa announce which door opened using triggers from Ring contact sensors.