Amazon Echo Hub: A Low-Cost High-End Smart Home Panel for a Customer Whose Smart Home Needs a Smartphone?

“It’s for customers who want to do more but find the smart home too intimidating or wanted a panel and found it’s too expensive,” he says, referring to high-end smart home control panels and remote controls you might find with a Crestron or Control4 system. “Because of the price point and how approachable it is, I think lots of people will find the Echo Hub a great addition.”

Instead of a camera, the Echo Hub has an IR sensor that it uses to wake up as you approach, so there’s no need to tap once and then tap again to activate any of the smart home widgets on the touch screen — such as turning on the lights or viewing a security camera.

The Echo Hub will be available to pre-order, and come with a wall mount, power adapter, and six foot cable. Amazon will sell decorative frames in wood, white (which can be painted), and metallic for $19.99 each, and the tabletop stand will cost $29.99.

You can include icons or larger group tiles for your favorite devices, cameras, climate, locks, and security in the widget. You can customize the screen, and along the side, a rooms panel gives you access to other defined rooms in the house and the option to run Routines directly from the panel.

He said the company worked to bring down the time between when the screen is touched and when a device responds. Locally connected devices over Thread, Matter, Bluetooth, or Zigbee respond very quickly — “as fast as a light switch,” he says.

Two-way audio is possible to speak to anyone at your video doorbell, via Drop In with Echo devices, or via Built in speakers and microphone array. You can also use Alexa voice control, listen to audio, or watch video. Limp says it will support Prime Video, Hulu, and Tubi, “among others,” at launch.

Limp says Amazon designed this device for its “best customer,” those with 20 or more connected smart home devices who perhaps find it all a bit too much to manage scrolling through endless device lists in the Alexa app.

I recently reviewed the Brilliant smart home control panel, which has a similar function as this (again without the hub features) but at a much higher price point ($400). These devices are expensive, but not wrong. The smart home range is in the thousands of dollars.

To build a digital version of your floor plan, you just need to pin connected devices to each room, and then you can control them from your map view.

It is fun, according to Limp. The controls just pop up if I want to change the thermostat. It’s easy to get the controls to dim or turn on the bedroom light if I want to zoom into the upper floor. It is a different paradigm and it is very interesting.

The approach clearly makes a lot of sense, and Amazon isn’t the only one to offer a map interface for its platform. It means you don’t have to remember the exact name of the light to the right of the sofa; you can see it and tap on it.

The Alexa Map View will be available in the US later this year through the Alexa app — but only on compatible lidar-equipped iOS devices (Pro and Max models from the iPhone 12 and newer) at launch. It’s coming early next year to the hub.

Later this year, with any compatible Echo or motion and ambient light sensor, Alexa will be able to automatically detect both brightness levels and activity in a room and intelligently decide whether to turn the lights on or off. The announcement was made at an event at Amazon’s new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and then via a post on Amazon.com from a VP of smart home.

While it doesn’t require any setup, automatic lighting can be customized. For example, you can specify the level of brightness that will trigger the lights to turn on and set the time of day you want it to work and the lights that it will control.

Of course, you can currently set up routines like this using Alexa’s Routines, but again, those can be fiddly to fine-tune to fit in perfectly with your daily movements. Automatic lighting is able to overcome this roadblock.

The Ring app is also getting Amazon’s featured routines. These are prepopulated routines designed to teach users how to use their devices. Previously only offered in the Alexa app, Amazon is bringing them to the Ring app based on your Ring devices.

All Ring devices, including lights, alarm, and doorbells, will work with the routines. The non- Ring devices that will be supported by it are smart lights and locks.