Review: Amazon’s Echo Show photo frame controls your house

Amazon’s play on a central smart home hub comes in the form of a picture frame that can play music, stream Netflix and keep track of your groceries – for $399.

Amazon's Echo Show 15 is a photo frame-sized smart home device that can control your house.

“How do you make a virtual assistant for pirates?”

“With aaaarrrr-tificial intelligence.”

That’s the joke of the day on Amazon’s smart home hub, a 15-inch device which looks like somebody snapped your laptop in two.

The central home device comes in the form of a picture frame that can play music, stream Netflix and keep track of your groceries. And that’s about it.

Eco Show 15 is a smart home hub with a physical touch face, something Amazon alongside many others favour, in contrast to display-less devices that rely on voice prompt and a mobile app. And maybe there’s good reason for that.

Eco Show 15 is a smart home hub with a physical touch face.

While the Echo Show 15 does have a slide camera cover, its ability to mute the microphone by pressing a button seems about as reliable as muting oneself on a Zoom call.

Without the camera cover, family members connected to the device can live-stream from the Echo Show 15’s camera on their mobile app – a slightly scary ability.

Amazon says the device is “designed to be the digital heart of your home”. I’d beg to differ.

At best it’s something of a digital clock which shows the weather, appointments and events via Google or Microsoft calendars, and you can turn your smart home devices on or off with a simple voice prompt.

The specs include a 1080p full HD display and Amazon’s AZ2 Neural Edge processor.

It is a little slow compared with the mobile phones and laptops out in the market today. There’s also no option to close apps, which means a user has to constantly click the home button to return to the original screen.

Its video mode opens to Prime, Netflix, ABC iview and Red Bull TV apps, where a user can stream movies and series. Alongside those apps are YouTube, Bing and TikTok, which open up a web page as opposed to an app.

At 15.6 inches, it’s probably not the device you’d watch Netflix or other streaming services on – rather something you’d use to watch a quick tutorial.

Its “boredom buster” prompts, which appear on the home screen, ask users which mythical creature they are: “To unleash the mythical creature within, answer the following questions,” it asks.

But these largely seem like voice-prompted surveys, with questions related to your current mood.

The Amazon Echo Show at best is a digital clock which shows the weather, appointments and events.

Speaking of data collection, Amazon does let the user know from set-up that it will be collecting a lot.

Wi-Fi passwords can, if users allow, be configured across compatible devices to connect to the internet without manual set-up.

The company makes it no secret that the device “processes and retains audio, interactions and other data in the cloud to provide and improve our services”.

Echo Show is another device that has multiple abilities to monitor and learn about the user.

Earlier this year, Amazon announced it had developed the software for Alexa to communicate with users in the voice of a deceased relative.

The verdict? If you’d like to replace your physical calendar with one that can also show you recipe videos on YouTube, then it might be OK – $399 seems a little steep for what it can offer but Amazon’s trade-in policy, which gives a user 25 per cent off a new Echo device plus a gift card, does sweeten the deal ever so slightly.