An Introduction to Amazon Echo

Often, the term Amazon Echo is used synonymously with Alexa. However, although both are interrelated, they point to very different things—Amazon Echo is the actual smart speaker (hardware), which is a gateway to Amazon's Alexa Skills service via an interactive voice-based personal assistant.

Amazon Echo has a whole device family and hence comes in many flavors, all of which are discussed in the following sections.

Amazon Echo – First Generation

Amazon Echo was the original first generation flagship smart speaker from Amazon. It requires a wireless internet connection to work as its voice capability (Alexa) is based on a cloud computing service by Amazon:

Figure 2.1: A first...