Amazon wants you to wear Alexa on your face with Echo Frames
Amazon already has an Alexa-enabled product for just about every room in your house. Now the company wants to put Alexa on an entirely new surface: your face.
The retailer just announced Echo Frames, eyeglasses that come with Alexa built-in. While the new glasses will undoubtedly bring up comparisons to Google Glass, Amazon's new eyeglasses don't have cameras or a display. Instead, the glasses are meant to make Alexa accessible at all times throughout the day.
The glasses have a microphone and small speaker built in, so you can ask Alexa questions or use commands to set reminders. The speaker is meant to beam sound towards the wearer's ears so they can hear it but people nearby won't (the idea is somewhat similar to Bose Frames sunglasses).
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Echo Frames will be on sale on a limited, invitation-only basis later this year for $179.99 and are available with or without prescription lenses.
If you don't want Alexa actually on your face, Amazon also introduced another new device for wearing its assistant: Echo Loop, a titanium ring you can use to control Alexa from your fingertips.
The ring has two mics, a speaker, and a haptic engine built in. You can use the microphones and speaker to interact with Alexa, and the haptic engine will trigger small vibrations, which can be linked to your phone's notifications.
"Simply press a button talk softly to Alexa and then the answer comes discretely through a small speaker built into the ring," Amazon notes.
It's difficult to imagine that talking to Alexa via a ring on your finger is at all "discrete," but Amazon notes that both Loop and Frames are somewhat experimental. The two new products are "Day 1 Editions," which means Amazon is only making a small number available as it looks for initial feedback.
Karissa was Mashable's Senior Tech Reporter, and is based in San Francisco. She covers social media platforms, Silicon Valley, and the many ways technology is changing our lives. Her work has also appeared in Wired, Macworld, Popular Mechanics, and The Wirecutter. In her free time, she enjoys snowboarding and watching too many cat videos on Instagram. Follow her on Twitter @karissabe.
