New Amazon Echo photo leak shows a camera and touchscreen

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Update: Ignore the image at the bottom of the page, pro product-sleuth Evan Blass found a high-res image that he shared via Twitter. 

Original story continues below...

Amazon is far from finished with its line of artificial intelligence-equipped smart devices. Earlier this week we learned about the Echo Look, and now we’ve seen our first image of the Amazon Echo with touchscreen, known internally as the Echo ‘Knight’. 

The new smart device is rumored to have an improved forward-facing speaker (goodbye 360-degree sound) and a camera that will enable video calling, in addition to the touchscreen. How exactly the new Echo device would achieve calling – whether it would tether to your phone or require its own SIM card – is still to be determined.

Regardless, the device will present numerous challenges to Amazon. 

All of the voice commands that we’ve grown accustom to over the last few years using the device will now require visuals to go alongside them. It will no longer be enough for Alexa to tell us the weather, but we’ll need an accompanying visual to go alongside it now, too. 

The leak comes by way of AFTVnews, who says a potential sticker price is likely to be more than $200 (the current price of the Amazon Echo) but below $300 – in between £150 and £250, or AU$270 and AU$400. 

The news outlet also says to expect the official unveiling of the product sometime in the near future – likely within the next month or so.

http://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/pPFHaV2aCscqXcVXCBGMP5.png

Here's the image AFTVnews found online

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So how, exactly, did AFTVnews find out about the new Echo device? 

Apparently AFTVnews did some digging on Amazon’s servers and located a low-res image for the device. While we wouldn’t always bite on these kinds of leaks, this is the same site that discovered the Amazon Echo Look one month before its announcement, so there’s some credibility built up here.

Does that mean it’s time to toss out the old Echo devices to make room for a camera-ready iteration? Well, we might not go that far just yet. 

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