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Amazons new Echo Dot Max is a $99 ball. Its Echo Studio is a $199 ball. Its Echo Show is a tablet (starting at $179), attached to a ball. For its grand refresh of its Alexa-powered line of speakers and tablets, Amazon spent three years rethinking the foundations of its audio engineering to conquer the home theater market in the most spherical manner possible. Legitimatelythey sound really good, says our senior editor Liz Stinson, after a listening test. But from my own discussions with the design team, its clear that what Amazon has created are not just new voice assistants, or even mix-and-matachable speakers capable of creating a 3D soundscape for movies and music in your home. What these new Echo products are supposed to do is enable a more intuitive (and intimate, and surveillant) AI for home tomorrowone that doesnt just hear what you say, but senses what you do. The Echo Studio (left) and Echo Dot Max (right). [Photo: Amazon] The industrial design behind Amazon Echo This is not the first time that Amazon has snuck Alexa into a little speaker ball. Its existing Echo Dot is already exactly that. But the Dot’s sound quality is middling at best. If you wanted something that sounded better from Amazon, you had to buy a larger Echo Studio: a big cylinder. When Amazon talked to its own customers, people often said it was just too large for them to buy. And thats because our entire culture has been wooed by tiny Bluetooth speakers with good enough audio quality. If I can get acceptable sound out of a small device, that’s what I expect now, says Phil Hilmes, Director, Audio Technology at Amazon Lab126. Amazons goal was to make a more competitive wave of smaller Echos that still sounded superbeven if that meant they cost more. So they doubled down on space efficient spherical designs across the new Echo line. To a casual observer, nothing looks all that new. But once you actually remove the original Dots candy shell, its clear just how differently the new Echos are built compared to the old ones. The old Dot was basically a single driver (a sound emitter), wrapped in a block of plastic housing that kept it positioned inside the ball. The new Echo speakers get rid of this housing entirely. A single driver has been replaced with multiple that specialize in different frequency ranges. These drivers connect directly to the outer shell, which doubles as an exoskeleton. This design leaves lots of empty space inside the sphere for tweeters and subwoofers to float, blowing air out of the speaker to make sound. At the end of the day, when we want to get more sound, it’s all about how much air can we push out of this thing? says Hilmes. Echo Dot Max, interior view. [Photo: Amazon] The Echo Dot Max has two driversone tweeter for the highs, and a larger woofer for mids and lows. They aim right at you for maximum clarity. Amazon telegraphs what right at you looks like by placing a new, flat control panel on the front of each speaker. Amazon says the Dot Max is one of the smallest two-way speakers ever created. The larger Echo Studiopromising Dolby Atmos soundhas three drivers that handle highs and mids. It also features a 4-inch subwoofer for the bass. Echo Studio [Photo: Amazon] Subwoofers are large by nature; they push more air and have bigger diaphragms to make those low sounds. When Richard Little, senior manager of audio technology at Amazon, holds up the Studios subwoofera cone the size of a coffee mug complete with saucerI cannot imagine how it fits inside. In fact, it barely fits. It fires straight down into the base, and the entire bottom of the Studio has been perforated to allow air out. Meanwhile, those three other drivers can only squeeze in by being integrated right into the subwoofers own structure. Its basically a wad of sound structures. Clever geometry and some small plastic caps are all that keep this pile of drivers sounding clear rather than buzzy and cacophonous. Amazon is wrapping the Echos in a new, 3D-knit fabric that offers a more luxe texture but doesnt dampen sound. I actually think thats a missed opportunity. The black cannonball design is still jarring, even when wrapped in domestic-friendly textiles. So why not lean into the unique shape? The internal components are so interesting that Amazon could have created a clear speaker celebrating high-end audio with throwback vibes like Nothing has been capitalizing upon. We want to work our way [there], says Pete Kyriacou, VP of product at Amazon, who admits Amazon has considered the more head-on audiophile approach. And we want to earn that credibility through people listening to our devices. [Photo: Amazon] Everything else the Echos can do The new Dot Max and Studio configure themselves automatically to project sound inside any room, and the more you add, the more the speakers can position 3D audio in space. This is particularly exciting for the team as its planning that the Echo can be part of a come-as-you are home theater setup. One in front of your TV acts something like a soundbar. Another stuck on a shelf to the side widens the soundscapewith each speaker compensating the right frequencies to sound balanced. Stick one behind your couch, and audio flies in from behind your head for full surround sound with three speakers. The system supports up to five, and the better 3D audio positioning is only available with the Studio, as the Dot Max doesnt have Dolby Atmos support. Optimization is automatic and constant. In fact, one of the most important parts of the audio is an AI that analyzes frequencies every moment, and tunes the power draw up and down across each individual driver dynamically to milk the most possible sound at any given moment. (The team tells me that this AI system doubles bass output through software optimization alone.) But of course, while Amazon is focusing on audio quality, its vision for Alexa+ goes much deeper. The speakers will glow with a blue ring when you activate them, and as the conversation goes on, it dulls to something more akin to a smile than a circlea nod to the Amazon logo that glows less brightly in your face. We’re finding what’s the right way to keep that light ring on without being intrusive, says Kyriacou, noting that the smile gives this human aspect of what you’re talking to. [Photo: Amazon] Beyond music Inside all of the new Echo devices live various sensors, including Wi-Fi for mapping devices in space, ultrasonic proximity detection that knows where you are, vibration-reading accelerometers that feel the tremors of your touch (or perhaps footfalls?), microphones for your voice, and cameras inside the two Echo Show tabletop tablets that can see who you are. For the first time, Amazon is assembling all of these sensors into an AI platform it calls Omnisense. AI is incredibly powerful at discovering insights hiding in sensor data. And with Omnisense, Amazon will likely be able to detect subtleties in our habits that we cant even imagine. But in the immediate, Kyriacou says it will allow Amazon to start getting more proactive with Alexa. That means these devices will know who is in the room, learn their routines (are they cooking or winding down with a book), and offer the right response (turn up the music? dim the lights?) for these moments. The Echo Show will see you coming, and change its own UIperhaps from family photos to smart home notificationsas you move closer. This sort of specific, contextually aware understanding has been a holy grail of the quite flawed promise of the smart home, and Amazon is redoubling its efforts to own the space through its latest wave of meticulously developed Echos. No doubt, Amazon’s storefront and services will move ever closer to our daily routines through speakers that are capable of harvesting new troves of largely invisible data. And while its a crafty enough plan, I cant help but wonder if theres one significant flaw. To use the Echo Dot Max or Studio to watch movies, in particular, you need to be using a Fire TV. Amazon has a grand vision for taking over the smart home through your home theater, but its limiting its reach to the most ardent Amazon loyalists. Sure, Amazon has shipped more than 200 million Fire TV devices to date. But thats a drop in the bucket compared to the billions of TVs in use worldwide.
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E-Commerce
Google’s YouTube has agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit President Donald Trump brought after the video site suspended his account following the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol following the election that resulted in him leaving the White House for four years.The settlement of the more than four-year-old case earmarks $22 million for Trump to contribute to the Trust for the National Mall and a construction of a White House ballroom, according to court documents filed Monday. The remaining $2.5 million will be paid to other parties involved in the case, including the writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.Alphabet, the parent of Google, is the third major technology company to settle a volley of lawsuits that Trump brought for what he alleged had unfairly muzzled him after his first term as president ended in January 2021. He filed similar cases Facebook parent Meta Platforms and Twitter before it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022 and rebranded as X.Meta agreed to pay $25 million to settle Trumps’ lawsuit over his 2021 suspension from Facebook and X agreed to settle the lawsuit that Trump brought against Twitter for $10 million. When the lawsuits against Meta. Twitter and YouTube were filed, legal experts predicted Trump had little chance of prevailing.After buying Twitter for $44.5 billion, Musk later became major contributor to Trump’s successful 2024 campaign that resulted in his re-election and then spent several months leading a cost-cutting effort that purged thousands of workers from the federal government payroll before the two had a bitter falling out. Both Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg were among the tech leaders who lined up behind Trump during his second inauguration in January in a show of solidarity that was widely interpreted as a sign of the industry’s intention to work more closely with the president than during his first administration.ABC News, meanwhile, agreed to pay $15 million in December toward Trump’s presidential library to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll. And in July, Paramount decided to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit regarding editing at CBS’ storied “60 Minutes” news program.The settlement does not constitute an admission of liability, the filing says. Google confirmed the settlement but declined to comment beyond it.Google declined to comment on the reasons for the settlement., but Trump’s YouTube account has been restored since 2023. The settlement is will barely dent Alphabet, which has a market value of nearly $3 trillion an increase of about $600 billion, or 25%, since Trump’s return to the White House.The disclosure of the settlement came a week before a scheduled Oct. 6 court hearing to discuss the case with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers in Oakland, California. Barbara Ortutay and Michael Liedtke, AP Technology Writers
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E-Commerce
The new Adobe Premiere Mobile is now available for free in the Apple Store. It promises pro-level video editing for YouTube and TikTok prosor anyone who needs cutting multiple tracks of video at 4K resolution together with motion graphics, subtitles generation, overlay captions, AI-generated stickers, and a never-ending list of technical features. That’s cool, but Adobe really had me on board when it showed off its AI sound generator, which can interpret your vocals to generate actual effects. Like you hum, “pa-pa! pa-pa! Paaaaa-para-pa-PA!” in your iPhone’s microphone, ask Premier to turn it into a fanfare, and it will remake your voice into a full orchestral 20th-Century-Foxy intro. It’s a fun feature that will save people countless hours going through never-ending lists of sound effects and music clips for their video edits. But please disregard my childhood Freddie Mercury dreams for a minute. The new Premiere looks like an excellent upgrade to Adobe Premiere Rush, the company’s previous free mobile video app. Rush looked bad and behaved even worse. Its interface was too hard and imprecise for my fat fingers to navigate on a tiny screen, and its feature set was lacking at best. Users often complained about the app simply not working. Adobe promises that this will not happen with the new Premiere Mobile, which is supposed to handle 4K HDR video with ease on any modern iPhone thanks to its new native iOS architecture. “Premiere Mobile is built from the ground up to take advantage of the core technology the iPhone offers”, says Mike Folgner, director of product management, digital video and audio at Adobe. “Creators want frame-by-frame precision, responsive and fast performance, and the ability to work across multiple tracks with full creative control. We saw how excited creators were about infinite layers in Photoshop mobile, and we knew we needed to bring that same freedom to Premiere mobile where were offering creators unlimited tracks.” Its unlimited multitrack timeline actually works like the desktop version, the company claims, editing with frame-accurate precision. [Image: Adobe] “We know that more and more content is being created entirely on mobile, from quick, short-form clips to more advanced edits,” Folgner tells me. “Its important to us that we meet creators where they are and empower all creators to tell their stories. “With Premiere Mobile, our goal is to provide the precision and control needed for complex edits, while keeping the experience intuitive for those just getting started.” A new look Aesthetically, the new apps interface seems to have taken a page from the successful Photoshop Mobile, with new, bolder control handles and style. Indeed, as Folgner points out, they have applied the same design principles and language to the new app. “Were making significant strides so that if a user is familiar with a toolset or interaction in one app, they can easily recognize and understand it in another,” he says. It seems that Adobe has finally figured out that a tiny phone display requires an entirely different interface. The larger controls and AI-aided featuresfrom the way clips get cut and snap to each other to its one-click background removal featurewill help with that. [Image: Adobe] At least one beta tester is happy with the UX redesign. YouTuber and designer Mai Pham believes “it is just truly built differently.” When I asked her how, she say it’s built for mobile workflows, and that it is a “game changer.” For Pham, “the large timeline view really makes it feel powerful, but still intuitive on a phone. Its not just a desktop tool squeezed into mobile, its designed differently, and I cant wait to see how it grows and evolves. Folgner says Adobe has worked with hundreds of creators throughout several stages of the process to shape the new app with their feedback. He claims that beta testers are excited about “how more efficient, unconstrained, and fluid” the new app is. Music to my lips The Generative Sound Effects tool is what stole my attention, however. It’s a good example of how AI can actually help the creative process. Premiere Mobile doesn’t make you search in a database to slap a stock audio clip onto your timeline: it creates perfectly timed sound elements based on text prompts and voice input. You describe the sound you want, hum the timing, and the AI builds custom audio that matches exactly what you want. This matters because most creators spend ridiculous amounts of time hunting through stock audio libraries or recording their own Foley effects. Now they can conjure soundscapes with their mouths. The app also includes a speech enhancing feature, another mus-have AI feature when it works. In theory, it transforms amateur audio recordings from your phones mic into crystal-clear voiceovers by removing echo and background noises. [Image: Adobe] AI galore Adobe is leaning hard on AI for many other functions. The new app includes a way to generate animated captions following different styles, with automatic subtitle generation, motion effects, and cinematic transitions all powered by AI. It also has automated color grading tools to unify your clips’ looks or change the mood of your video. These are handled with a single finger in what Adobe calls tap-to-adjust functionality. Adobe also claims that its Firefly-based tools will let users generate commercially safe stickers, turn images to video clips directly within the mobile interface, and expand the background of a video clip. Finally, one-tap exports automatically resize videos for every major social platform including TikTok, YouTube Shorts, or Instagram, keeping the main action in frame again using AI. This intelligent export system, Adobe claims, creates platform-optimized versions with proper aspect ratios and compression settings. Adobe Premiere Mobile is available now forpaPA-paPAAAAAA!free.
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