Amazon is introducing voice control to its new Fire TV Stick. The new Fire Stick will be sold in UK, Germany and Japan and will feature Alexa voice control. Alexa voice control is currently used on the Amazon Echo multimedia speaker and the Stick includes a remote.
The new Fire Stick has been on sale in the US and has quickly become a bestseller on Amazon.com, according to Marc Whitten, VP, Amazon Fire TV. He also said that the product has received more than 35,000 five-star reviews.
Starting in April, the new Firestick will be available in the UK at £39.99, whilst in Germany the stick will sell at €39.99. Amazon are accepting pre-orders now for both the UK and Germany.
Analyst Comment
I’ve been trying the Alexa for the last few weeks. It’s very impressive, especially for playing internet radio, which I use a lot, and for music. I have also found it convenient, when writing articles for the newsletter. In the middle of writing, asking ‘Alexa, what is 37″ in centimetres” and then typing in the answer is much quicker than starting another app. I also bought the remote control, but haven’t used it much, although it seems to work as well as the main system. A disadvantage is that the Echo is only mono and has no line output, a surprising omission.I have very good speakers on my PC as I care about audio, so I’m tempted to try the smaller Echo Dot, which has no integrated audio, so does have a stereo line out. I could then move the main echo into the living room. My wife has never got the hang of using a tablet or other system to control the media player connected to our main hi-fi, so she rarely bothers to listen to music. However, if she could just ask Alexa to ‘play Aerosmith’, she just might!
The area that I haven’t tried yet is the IoT area as I haven’t got into that, yet. However, the easy control has tempted me. I have been uploading all my music to the Amazon Music cloud service, which is very cheap. I’m up to around 10,500 songs so far. That, plus my Flickr account is probably enough to mean that I can finally retire the Windows Home Server that I have been running for the last 10 years or so. If you exclude music and photography, I don’t need much storage (although Flickr will only store JPGs so if I sacrificed the server, I would lose the RAW files, which, as a photographer, is like throwing away the negatives. That might be a bridge too far. (BR)
