Alexa Becomes a Shopper’s Virtual Stylist With New Echo Smart Screen

In a move aimed at connecting voice-powered shopping, entertainment and information systems via a bigger touch screen, Amazon’s latest wall-mounted iteration of its Echo device not only marks a technological step forward for the company, but an incremental advance for the nascent voice commerce category too.

Named after the size of its screen, the new “Echo Show 15” marks the marriage of multiple categories into a single platform. It’s designed to serve as the interactive hub of the household that can seamlessly communicate with Alexa, Fire TVs, eCommerce sites, music, news, light switches, thermostats and more — with either a simple voice command or a swipe of a finger.

“Echo Show 15 brings everything that makes your household tick into one place,” Amazon Alexa Senior Vice President Tom Taylor said in a press release.

The Echo upgrade was one of many advances rolled out at Amazon’s annual hardware event Wednesday (Sept. 28) where the Echo Show 15 was touted as the eCommerce giant’s most advanced smart TV to date thanks to its ability to serve as an entertainment center that doubles as a voice shopping assistant and home-life organizer, all in a single wall-mounted package that resembles an attractive picture frame or rests on a tabletop stand.

Holidays and Beyond

The big product push not only syncs with the upcoming members-only sales event but coincided with research that shows a growing consumer embrace of voice commerce and connected home products and services.

As detailed in PYMNTS’ “ConnectedEconomy Monthly Report: The Rise of the Smart Home,” an estimated 53 million United States consumers now use automatic and smart home technologies, such as Roombas and climate control systems, while 79 million Americans also use voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Home to help manage daily chores and their connected homes.

The ability to more deeply connect smart homes to shopping features — especially voice activated ones — has been the holy grail of sorts for Amazon, Google and others in the industry that are looking to take the lead on what most see as an inevitable next step.

According to PYMNTS smart home study, consumers’ mounting expectations for convenience in the retail sector are driving similar demand for convenience in every part of their lives, including in their homes, where the share of consumers using smart home devices and other digital home applications is high — and still rising — from peak COVID-era usage trends set in 2021, and they’re showing no signs of waning.

Amazon Goes All In

This burgeoning business opportunity has not escaped Amazon, which has been building out a multi-device, multimedia ecosystem of integrated hardware, software, content and product for years with a string of refinements and enhancements.

“We’re doubling down with Shop the Look, a new feature on Echo Show devices that leverages a breakthrough in how our [artificial intelligence (AI)] understands and acts on customer references of visual attributes,” Alexa Global Business Vice President Heather Zorn said.

Zorn said users can employ intuitive phrases like “Alexa, show me the one-shoulder top” and see matching results. This is based on the Alexa Teacher Model, “which is pre-trained on images and multilingual captions and fine-tuned on the Amazon product catalog.”

With its second Prime Day event — dubbed the Prime Early Access Sale — scheduled for Oct. 11 and 12, the eCommerce giant is clearly lining up consumers to expand on at-home trends that took root during the pandemic, and driving more connected shopping through its devices, in many cases directly back to Amazon itself for purchases.

That event is already aligned for Alexa shoppers, with a Monday (Sept. 26) press release noting that “Prime members who don’t want to miss a deal can add products to their Wish List, Cart or Save for Later list. Alexa can notify members up to 24 hours before eligible deals go live on items they’ve added to their lists — and even offer to purchase the deal once it’s available.”

See also: Amazon Leverages Membership Surge With October Prime Day Push