The 4 biggest Amazon smart home announcements from today

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• Amazon just announced five new smart home devices for its lineup.
• There’s new categories: the $230 Alexa Photo Frame and the $200 Echo Time.
• And new Alexa Home Map creates 3D maps of your home’s interior and exterior.

Amazon announced several new smart home devices today, including two all-new device categories: the $200 Echo Time smart alarm clock and the $230 Alexa Photo Frame. Both are available now, along with an upgraded Echo Dot for $100 and a new Echo Studio with a built-in Home Camera for $250.

Also: Amazon’s new Echo Dot can turn into a Wi-Fi extender – how it works

The company’s smart home lineup also now includes a redesigned $500 Echo Show 16, which is available for preorder, with devices shipping in mid-December. Finally, Amazon announced the Alexa Home Map, which lets you create a 3D interactive map of your home’s interior and exterior.

1. Echo Time combines a smart alarm clock and home hub

The Amazon Echo Time is a new bedside companion and a definite upgrade over the Echo Spot. It’s a rounded speaker with a display and no camera, designed to be the smartest combination of alarm clock and hub available.

Also: Amazon’s new Echo Studio gives Alexa+ an AI camera to see inside your home

The Echo Time doubles as a smart home hub, since it supports Zigbee and Matter and acts as a Thread border router. It costs $200, so it’s a definite price hike compared to the Echo Spot, but it’s also a more capable speaker with hub capabilities.

2. Alexa Photo Frame displays photos and records voice notes

The Amazon Alexa Photo Frame is another first for Amazon, arriving just in time for the holidays. The photo frame consists of a 10.1-inch matte display with Alexa+ built in, made to cycle through your own collection of photos. It also allows you to search for specific photos by voice, as well as record voice notes associated with individual photos.

Amazon

The Alexa Photo Frame comes in three frame finishes, including Birch, Walnut, and Black, so it can fit in with your home decor. It costs $230 and is already available for purchase.

3. Echo Show 16, Echo Dot, and Echo Studio get upgrades

Amazon also announced some big upgrades coming to the Echo lineup. They include a redesigned Echo Show 16, a new Echo Dot, and an upgraded Echo Studio with Home Camera.

• Amazon Echo Show 16: Entirely redesigned from the inside out, the Echo Show 16 features rounded edges, a 16-inch display, a slim tablet-like construction, and an upgraded 13-megapixel camera. The Echo Show 16 is available for preorder at $500, with devices shipping in mid-December.
• Amazon Echo Dot (6th Gen): A fan favorite among Alexa users, the Echo Dot is a compact speaker that is getting its first major upgrade since 2022. Powered by Alexa+, the Echo Dot offers bright, full sound and acts as a smart home hub, with support for Zigbee, Matter, Thread, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
• Amazon Echo Studio with Home Camera: The new Echo Studio aims for room-filling sound with automatic room adaptation and a camera that supports adaptive volume, so it adjusts based on where you are in the room. The 13-megapixel camera also lets you check in on your pets and home when you’re out and “show” Alexa+ items to discuss using the bot’s visual intelligence. It’s not “always-on,” but instead has to be invoked, with visual lighting effects on the front to indicate the camera is on.

4. Alexa Home Map creates a 3D view of your home and devices

The new Alexa Home Map lets you create a 3D interactive map of your home’s interior and exterior, allowing you to navigate floors, zoom into rooms, and see the locations of all your devices while controlling them in real time.

The concept isn’t a novel idea for Amazon, but the Alexa Home Map elevates the experience offered by the Amazon Alexa app’s Map View feature, which we covered at launch three years ago. Map View lets you create a basic layout of the rooms inside your home to place and tap device icons.

Amazon

Unlike Map View, which focuses on indoor smart devices within four walls, the new Alexa Home Map offers a 360-degree aerial view of your property. It uses your Ring cameras to generate animations of people and cars moving around your yard and uses the controversial Familiar Faces feature to let you know who was detected.

The Familiar Faces feature uses AI-powered facial recognition to identify individuals and save their faces so the device can recognize them when they return, raising questions about consent and privacy. It is the subject of at least one lawsuit.

Also: Alexa Tablet 12 Pro review: Forget everything you knew about Amazon tablets

You create the 3D interactive map of your home by using a compatible smartphone with a lidar feature to scan each room and then putting them together. You can then place Alexa-compatible smart home devices in each room and interact with them in real time, like turning on a light or lowering the volume on a speaker.

For the exterior of your home, enter your address, and the app will generate an Alexa Home Map of your residence using existing map data.

Alexa Home Map’s security and privacy concerns

Using integrations with compatible Alexa devices, including Echo devices, Ring and Blink cameras, Fire TV devices, and other “Works with Alexa” smart home devices, will improve your home security, Amazon says. But it also opens the door for a whole lot more surveillance of your home, both for potential bad actors and for Amazon itself.

Amazon claims that the Alexa Home Map will update dynamically in real time, gathering data from your smart devices in and around your home. As a result, it can show the color of your smart twinkle lights during the holidays, as well as animations of people and cars moving around your property.

Amazon

While having an interactive map of your devices is surely a big convenience for many smart home users, the question arises of whether that much information should be available to an outsider. Aggregating your home’s layout, smart appliances, and security devices into a 3D interface introduces its own share of privacy concerns, including exposing users to account takeovers and invasive data breaches.

A vulnerability in a single third-party smart device could theoretically be used to pivot deeper into your home network or manipulate the map interface, not to mention that the data in this 3D map will include sensitive and private behavioral patterns, like when the family leaves the home or when children return.

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ZDNET reached out to a cybersecurity expert to comment on the matter.