Amazon Echo Show: The future of Alexa should be worth the wait

As Amazon’s gadgets seem to go from strength to strength, I sat down with David Limp, the senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon, to learn about the Alexa's next steps and the company's future plans.

However, since one of the big successes of the company's devices division has been the Kindle ebook reader, I began by asking David Limp about that.

“We’ve just got done with another Prime Day, which was a record day. On Kindle, which is coming up on its 10-year anniversary this November, a big milestone for us, it was the best-selling day in the history of Kindle. So, 10 years and you know if you were to listen to the pundits talk, they say nobody’s buying readers anymore. But I can assure you lots of people are. And we’re really excited that people still love dedicated readers and we’re going to continue inventing there.”

Some people find ebook readers useful, others say they can’t compare to a regular, paper book. I’m sure Limp is a Kindle devotee, but does he see any downsides to electronic readers compared to real books?

“There’s a lot of good things about a paper book: infinite battery life, for instance. Paper is ultimately as reflective as you can get, out in the sunlight. You can fold it and bend it and it’s flexible. So there’s some good qualities that we still have some catching up to do in terms of our dedicated devices. Now, I would argue that we’re ahead of the paper book in many places. On holiday if you’re on a beach and you get done with the last book and you don’t have the next one with you then Kindle is very valuable, you can just download the next one.”

Of course, you can also look up words if you need to, or increase font size if your eyes need a little help. The Kindle has changed in the last 10 years.

“Nothing makes me happier to see original, first- or second-generation Kindles, somebody reading on a plane, say. They have gotten great value out of that product. We still pay the wireless bill [which means readers can connect to the Kindle Store anywhere there’s a 3G signal, worldwide]. The store still works: you can still download the latest bestsellers. Now is it the best device to read on anymore? I would say probably not. The state of the art has moved forward but it’s still very useful and we’re going to continue to support it.”

That reference to the state of the art is the Kindle Oasis, which is much lighter and thinner than the original Kindle, with a longer-lasting battery, adjustable frontlight for reading in darker rooms, has a higher-resolution display and so on.

The Amazon business model, sometimes criticised by rivals, is that it sells its hardware at a loss. I ask Limp about this. “Our view is that effectively we sell our devices at what they cost us to make them, sometimes a little more, sometimes a bit less, but it’s just basically what it costs us. And the reason behind that business model is we don’t want to make profits when customers just buy the devices and put them in a drawer. We want to make profits when customers use their devices.”

So how about perhaps the most celebrated Amazon devices of recent years, the Echo and its smaller sibling, Echo Dot? These are the smart speakers that are home to Alexa, the voice-activated personal assistant.

“I think we launched the product with a kind of humble aspiration of what it might do. That changed quickly, though, because when we put it up for sale, for invite only, it just blew through our expectations in the first couple of hours and it didn’t take long to get the first hints that we might be on to something. But you also have an equal or maybe even greater chance of failure. Because you wouldn’t be inventing without the risk of failure.’

Of course, that risk-taking can lead to defeat as well as success. At about the same time, Amazon launched its Fire Phone, which did not do well. Did it not succeed because it was going into a saturated market?

“I don’t think so. We’re willing to take bold bets and both those products had lots of invention in them. And then it’s kind of up to customers to decide which resonates with them. And customers told us that they wanted Echo and Alexa in in large quantities but they also told us on the Fire phone that it wasn’t differentiated enough from the others that were out there to rise to the top. And I think you have to be prepared to accept both ends of that when you’re inventing and the key is to double down on the ones that are working and go back and try to refine and or reset the ones that don’t.”

So where next for Alexa? The latest Echo gadget, the Echo Show, which has a display on it, hasn’t yet gone on sale in the UK.

“When we decided to add a screen to Echo we really spent a lot of time thinking about what the UI should be for that ambient screen. And we even tried some versions of our tablet user interface, and I can tell you it was not good because you don’t want to have to run across the room to touch something or squint, so everything has to be visible from seven feet away and we use larger fonts.

“It has to work equally as well if you’re facing the stove cooking pasta and listening to her as if you glanced over and saw it. So a lot of what the user interface does is present additional information. I could ask what the weather is in London. Voice-wise, we read off a pretty short answer. But if you have the screen then at the end it will, in a beautiful way, show you the five-day forecast. Another example: Echo Show plays music just as well as today’s Echo does but if you’re watching the screen the lyrics will be scrolling in synchronisation with that. It’s just delightful.”

No UK release date is set, but it offers a new way to interact with Alexa and adds to the range of places to find her, which now include recent Amazon tablets as well.

The range of products continues to grow, and Limp is committed to taking the time needed for each one.

"Our original vision of Echo was to release it in maybe a year and a half. It took more like three and a half. And so you can’t put a timeline on invention. But, you know, I think that’s a great process because it does start with the customer.

"If you build something that you think the customer will want even if it sometimes takes longer than you thought, then it generally works out pretty well."