Amazon’s Echo speakers now have spherical designs, on-device speech processing

Amazon today announced redesigned versions for some of its Echo smart speakers, giving them spherical designs. The Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Dot with Clock now have spherical designs now, with the blue light ring at the bottom. The design gives them a more futuristic, stylish and fresh feel than before. Amazon also claims that the audio quality on the Dots would be improved now.

More importantly, the speakers now have a new on-device speech recognition module, which allows them to process voice locally. Currently, an Echo has to listen to the user’s voice, send it to the cloud where it’s processed and then respond with the result. A part of this processing will be done locally on the device, which means that the speakers will become faster than before, an addition many users will appreciate.

The company calls this the AZ1 Neural Edge silicon module, which uses local on-device machine learning to process voice requests locally. The Echo speaker also has a built-in Zigbee hub, which lets it recognise smart home devices automatically.