Order now Amazon’s mammoth kitchen or sideboard smart display – the Echo Show 15. Delivery begins on December 9th.
Significantly larger than the Spin-Around Echo Show 10, the 15.6-inch display can do the same things as other Echo Show devices, but home screen widgets are designed to bring more information at a glance for busy families and households to display.
In other words, it’s a collaborative device and can tailor content to the people who talk to it. Just like other Echo devices, Show 15 recognizes who is in front of it, although this time it can tell who is in front of the device if they are registered – Amazon calls this Visual ID.
You can have widgets for everyday things like weather, sticky notes, shopping lists, and your calendar, and arrange them however you want. When it launched the device in September, Amazon also said there was a widget library that third-party vendors could also design.
The black frame and white bezel houses a full HD display. You can watch content from Netflix and Prime Video, but frustratingly still not YouTube, which remains a huge mistake in our book.
Likewise, you can video call other Echo Show devices and use Skype, but Zoom is not yet available in the UK but is available on some Echo Show devices in the US. It also doesn’t include the 13-megapixel Follow-Me camera setup from last year’s Echo Show 8, but instead sticks to a 5-megapixel front camera.
Other cameras in your home – such as a ring doorbell – can be shown picture-in-picture, so you can keep an eye on everything while watching a program or following a recipe.
Amazon also announced during its annual Echo and Alexa launch event that over the next year you will be able to review inquiries about specific household members who have a Voice ID set up on the Alexa app or by visiting Alexa Privacy Settings.
So you can say: “Alexa, update my privacy settings” and Alexa will help you to adjust settings such as the storage duration of voice recordings and their use per person. As with other Echo Show devices, the Echo Show 15 has a physical camera shutter and microphone muting.
