Content area
Full Text
On 6 November 2014, Amazon surprised the tech community by casually unveiling its newest “futuristic gadget experiment”: the Amazon Echo (Wong, 2015). Choosing to forego the usual fanfare of tech launches, the Echo was announced using a press release and a string of promotional images and videos, showcasing a sleek, black cylindrical object with pulsating blue lights and perforated speaker holes. Although from the outside it resembled a Bluetooth speaker, an already popular commercial product, it quickly became apparent that the Echo was capable of much more than just playing music. The Echo had an in-built, voice-controlled digital assistant called Alexa, which, like Apple’s Siri, could respond to verbal commands and provide the user with information about news, weather, traffic, and more. It could sync with other applications, create to-do lists, shopping lists, and schedule appointments and reminders. More distinctively though, the Echo could also connect to other wifi-enabled devices to effectively function as a voice-controlled “smart home hub” controlling other smart home products such as light bulbs, thermostats, and switches (Amazon, 2015). Fitted with an array of microphones, the device was designed to be “always on” and, thus, always listening. While many reviewers praised the Echo as exactly “what smart homes should feel like” (Wong, 2015), others were more apprehensive, particularly because all interactions were recorded and saved unless users chose to manually delete them. One reviewer condemned the Echo, describing it as “a trojan horse [for Corporate America] to penetrate our remaining private moments” (Wasserman, 2014) while another suspiciously asked, “Alexa, what are you hiding?” (Murphy, 2014).
(Data for the chapter was collected from online promotional videos, customer reviews, Youtube parody videos, and tech reviews. To respect the anonymity of customer reviewers, names have been redacted and references to their customer accounts have been removed.)
Despite these concerns, the Echo received almost instant commercial success and over the next few years would come to dominate both the market and the cultural imaginary for smart home devices. Following its initial limited release, the Echo received a general US release in 2015, followed by its first international releases in the UK and Germany in 2016. By December 2017, it had expanded into thirty-four countries with Amazon introducing a full product line of over half a...