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Old 04-19-2016, 09:10 AM   #540
tubemonkey
monkey on the fringe
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Here's an interesting article from Bloomberg about the creation of the Echo.

The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo

Quote:
The talking speaker started as part of a secret augmented-reality project and ended up as a surprise hit.

Telling Jeff Bezos he’s wrong is always a frightening proposition. In the fall of 2014, though, a small group of the men and women building Amazon’s new voice-controlled speaker felt they needed to confront the CEO. The release of the speaker was looming, and for the most part, things were falling into place. The device looked good, its voice recognition software was improving quickly, and even the boxes it would ship in had been designed and assembled. But there was a lingering issue with the name printed on those boxes: the Amazon Flash.

Many people who worked at Lab126, Amazon’s hardware division, hated the name, according to two former employees. Bezos, on the other hand, was strongly in favor. And there was another worry. A core feature of the device is a “wake word” that cues it to begin taking voice commands when spoken. One of the two words being considered was “Alexa.” Bezos thought the best word would be “Amazon.” This presented a challenge, because people say that word a lot. A common opinion within Lab126 was that the project was hurtling toward a potential disaster: The speakers would wake upon hearing Amazon ads on television and commence buying random stuff from the Internet.
Quote:
Amazon created Lab126 in 2004 to build the Kindle e-reader. The lab’s name is a reference to the alphabet, with 1 representing the letter A and 26 representing Z. People in the lab sometimes refer to the Kindle as Project A. Project B was the Fire Phone. Work on the Echo—Project D—began in 2011. At the project’s peak, there were several hundred employees in Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Cambridge, Mass., who worked on D.

The idea for the Echo was an offshoot of Project C, and many of the early employees on the Echo moved over from C. Amazon remains particularly eager to keep this project a secret, even though work on it has stopped. But a sense of the focus and scope of the idea can be gleaned from patent applications filed by engineers at Lab126.
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