smart speaker

Amazon's Echo duo gets a smarter home and a bigger ear

Amazon's new Echo speakers have a bigger ear for your smart home, and that's exactly where the company's focus should be. The Echo duo arrives with enhanced smart home capabilities baked in, which means less fumbling with the Alexa app and more actually talking to your lights. It's not a reinvention of the speaker, it's a refinement that knows what you're actually using the thing for. The bigger ear isn't just for show; it's about hearing you over the blender, the vacuum, the chaos. That's the razor clam here: Amazon finally understands that a smart speaker's job isn't to sound great playing music, it's to listen better than you do.