Everything Amazon Announced Today at Its Fall Hardware Event

Amazon’s next-gen Alexa+ chatbot is now available in four new Echo devices and a bevy of Ring cameras. The company also debuted three new Kindle Scribe tablets, one with a color screen.

Panos Panay senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon.com Inc.

Panos Panay, senior vice president of devices and services at Amazon.com Inc.Photograph: Julian Chokkattu

All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. Learn more.

It’s a big year for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. It got a large language model power-up earlier this year in the form of Alexa+ (a paid upgrade for non-Amazon Prime subscribers), and now, Amazon has fresh hardware to take advantage of the assistant’s new capabilities. At an event in New York City, Amazon senior vice president Panos Panay took to the stage to unveil a slew of devices, ranging from a new TV operating system called Vega to power its Fire TV Stick to a Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. There are also finally new Echo speakers running Alexa+ out of the box, 2K and 4K Ring cameras, and new devices from Blink.

Here’s everything Amazon announced today.

New Echo Speakers and Displays

The Amazon Echo (4th Gen) hasn’t seen a refresh since 2020, but if you were expecting a 5th Gen model today, you’re out of luck. Instead, Amazon announced the Echo Dot Max ($100), a new Echo Studio ($220), an Echo Show 8 ($180), and an Echo Show 11 ($220).

Amazon's Panos Panay shows off a new Echo.

Panay says the smart displays have vibrant, thin screens, the speakers have a new 3D knit fabric with no seams, and they’re all “acoustically transparent” for vibrant sound. The Echo Dot Max is powered by Amazon’s new AZ3 chip, with the other devices utilizing the AZ3 Pro. Amazon says they’re faster, more powerful, with faster wake-word detection and up-to-date on-device AI processing. They also feature Amazon’s Omnisense technology, which uses a range of sensors to help Alexa understand what’s happening in the home, such as whether your front door is unlocked at night, and it can also offer better personalized experiences for each person in the room.

The Echo Dot Max has two drivers and supposedly three times the bass performance of the previous Echo Dot. The Echo Studio bumps that up to three full-range drivers, a high-excursion woofer, and it’s built for spatial audio with Dolby Atmos support. The light ring is now on the front instead of the top, and it’ll light up when Alexa+ is listening, thinking, and talking. These two speakers support Alexa Home Theater, which lets you put together five Echo Studio or Echo Dot Max devices with a Fire TV for a surround sound home theater system.

Over on the Show models, they now have a 13-megapixel camera for richer details on your video calls, with improved audio quality as well. Amazon says more and more companies are integrating with Alexa+, touting an Oura partnership that lets you ask Alexa about last night’s sleep with data collected from your Oura ring. More integrations are on the way, including the ability to buy movie tickets with Fandango.

All of these Echo devices are available for preorder today.

Alexa+ Is Still in Early Access

Alexa+ was announced back in February and began rolling out in early access by March. Not much is changing about this. Amazon says Alexa+ is now rolling out in the US “during an early access period” and in waves over the coming months. It’ll prioritize Echo Show 8, 10, 15, and 21 device owners in this period, and you can sign up for early access here. The fastest way to access it is to buy one of the new Echo devices announced today.

Alexa+ is an upgrade over the standard Alexa you’re familiar with. Powered by a large language model, it allows you to be more conversational with the assistant. Alexa+ is much faster at answering more topical and contextual questions, correctly answering things like “What’s that popular Soda Pop song?” You can read more here about our experience using it for a week.

Alexa+ is free for Amazon Prime subscribers, but costs $20 a month for everyone else. Amazon says Alexa+ is being integrated into other devices from Sonos, Bose, Samsung, LG, and BMW.

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft

The Kindle Scribe is a relatively new entry in Amazon’s e-reader ecosystem, but now it’s already in its third generation. And for the third iteration, there are three new 11-inch Kindle Scribe models: Kindle Scribe ($430), Kindle Scribe With Frontlight ($550), and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft ($630). These devices are 5.4 mm thick, which is thinner than the new iPhone Air. They weigh 400 grams and are made from precision-milled aluminum. Panay says they’re 40 percent faster, though he wasn’t specific about what he was comparing them to. When you write, you should experience a reduced latency of under 12 milliseconds.

The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is the first Kindle with writing capabilities to feature a color screen, matching the Colorsoft Amazon released last year and over the summer. However, Amazon says there’s a new rendering engine for a richer color-writing experience.

There are a handful of new Kindle features debuting with these devices. Quick Notes, for example, is your new digital scratch pad for jotting down notes. Kindle Workspace lets you compile books, documents, and files together in one workspace. And you can now import and export your files with OneDrive and Google Drive from the Scribe. (You can also send handwritten notes to OneNote and Alexa+.) They also feature AI-powered notebook search, making it easier to find your documents from the digital stack.

It’s not just all about writing, either, as there are two new reading features: Story So Far and Ask This Book. The former gives a recap of what has happened in the book so far, and the latter lets you ask questions about characters, plot lines, and story arc. Both are spoiler-free.

The Kindle Scribe With Frontlight and Scribe Colorsoft will launch later this year, and the basic version will be available early next year.

New Fire TVs and the Vega Operating System

Amazon has new Fire TVs available for preorder today from the Fire TV Omni Series ($480 and up), Fire TV 4 Series ($330 and up), and Fire TV 2 Series ($160 and up), which go down in price, respectively. Each of these TVs has multiple size options to choose from, is 30 percent faster than before, and features new capabilities like Dialogue Boost and Omnisense. The latter will turn the TV on when you enter a room and turn it off when you leave. The Omni Series also has an always-on Alexa that you can talk to at any moment, no remote needed.

The Fire TV stick still looks the same but has new capabilities.

If you don’t want to upgrade your TV, Amazon has a new Fire TV Stick 4K Select for $40. For the first time, it is powered by a new operating system called Vega. Amazon’s Fire TVs and dongles have long used its Fire OS operating system, powered by Android. However, the company is trying to gain more control over its software, and for that, it needs its own platform. Vega also powers the new Echo devices, though it’s unclear if the new TVs are also using Vega.

Amazon says the new Fire TV Stick 4K Select is faster and has 4K and HDR10+ support, and will include a slew of popular apps from YouTube and Netflix to Peacock, BBC, Plex, and Disney+. Preorders for all of these devices are available today.

2K and 4K Ring Hardware

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who returned to Amazon earlier this year, took the stage to announce a handful of new Ring cameras. Siminoff reinforced the company’s stance on acting as a neighborhood surveillance system, saying a “new era in neighborhood safety starts now.”

Underpinning the new Ring hardware is Amazon’s new Retinal 2K and Retinal 4K image processing system, which Siminoff says offers superior low-light performance thanks to large aperture lenses that capture more light. AI-driven tuning of the image signal processor supposedly delivers higher-quality footage, so much so that the company says its Retinal 2K and Retinal 4K resolutions are better than standard 2K and 4K upgrades. There’s even a Retinal Tuning system that will sample your camera quality a few times a day for two weeks, and then deliver a final optimization that offers the best image quality for your specific scenes.

The Retinal 2K cameras include a Ring Wired Doorbell Plus 2K ($180) and Indoor Cam Plus 2K ($60). The Retinal 4K lineup starts with the Wired Doorbell Pro 4K ($250), and includes the Outdoor Cam Pro 4K ($200), Spotlight Cam Pro 4K ($250), and Floodlight Cam Pro 4K ($280). There will also be Power over Ethernet (PoE) versions of some of these devices. All are available for preorder today. Keep in mind that a higher resolution camera uses more bandwidth, so you’ll need a fast internet connection to handle multiple streams of 4K or 2K footage, especially if you’re coming from a 1080p camera.

Ring cameras have better resolution and can now work together to help find lost dogs in your neighborhood.

There are three new features available in these cameras, some of which are also coming to existing devices. The first is Familiar Faces. Similar to what Google offers with its Nest cameras, you can enroll your friends and family, and the cameras will be able to recognize faces to alert you exactly who is at the door. Next is Alexa+ Greetings, which lets you manage greetings for whoever is at the door. Say you have specific instructions for FedEx—you can have an Alexa+ Greeting that tells them to place the package in a specific location. Alexa+ Greetings launches on the new hardware first but will roll out to existing customers in December.

Finally, there’s Search Party, which is a neighborhood-powered Ring feature that helps people find lost dogs. Siminoff says once someone triggers a Search Party to find a lost dog, the neighborhood’s Ring outdoor cameras will actively use AI to spot dogs. If you’re the owner of a Ring camera that spots the pup, you can choose to send the information to the dog’s owner. Amazon says it’ll roll out in November, with support for cats and other pets coming later on.

It’s worth noting that Ring has brought back features that allow law enforcement to request footage from you in the event of an incident. Ring customers can choose to share video, and they can stay anonymous if they opt not to send the video. “There is no access that we’re giving police to anything other than the ability to, in a very privacy-centric way, request footage from someone who wants to do this because they want to live in a safe neighborhood,” Siminoff tells WIRED.

New Blink Cameras

Blink has two new cameras, the Blink Mini 2K+ ($50) and Blink Outdoor 2K+ ($90). The biggest upgrade here is the bump in resolution, from 1080p to 2K resolution. That means more details in your clips, but it also means more data for Amazon’s AI to absorb and process. However, more interesting is Amazon’s new Blink Arc ($100) accessory. This gizmo lets you fuse two compatible Blink cameras to get a full 180–degree footage; it essentially gives you pan-and-tilt functionality without the camera having to actually pan and tilt.