Amazon’s new Echo Studio speaker has a camera

is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

Amazon is giving its premium smart speaker a camera. The new Echo Studio with Home Camera, announced today as part of Amazon’s big blast of announcements, has a built-in camera for monitoring a room while you’re away, showing things to Alexa, and, soon, to use with video calls on Fire TV devices. It’s an iteration on the revised Echo Studio announced last year, which had a brand-new design.

The Echo Studio with Home Camera also offers some audio updates. Amazon says a new feature called “Advanced Room Adaptation” will continuously tune sound to the space that the speaker is in. There’s also an “Adaptive Volume” feature that raises or lowers volume depending on where you are in a room so that “your music or audiobook maintains the same volume as you move about.”

The new Echo Studio with Home Camera will cost $249.99 and come in graphite. Amazon will still sell the standard Echo Studio at its $219.99 price.

Photo by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge

Amazon is also updating the Echo Dot, and the new version is powered by Amazon’s custom-designed AZ3 chip and has a fourth microphone to improve your conversations with Alexa. The Dot also now has a built-in smart home hub, supporting Zigbee, Matter, and Thread, and has a built-in Eero Wi-Fi extender that Amazon says can add up to 1,000 square feet of coverage.

The updated Echo Dot is available starting today for $99.99 in graphite, glacier white, agave green, and coral pink.

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