All the biggest announcements from Amazon’s September 2023 product launch event

Amazon is finally turning its Echo Show into a proper digital photo frame, but you have to pay extra for the privilege. Announced at its fall hardware event this week, the new Echo Show 8 Photos Edition costs $10 more than the standard edition of the new smart display but lets you make your photos the “primary home screen content.”

The Show 8 Photos Edition is coming this Fall for $159.99 and has all the same features as the new Echo Show 8 (third-gen). But for the extra $10, you get a six-month subscription to Amazon’s new PhotosPlus service, which enables this new “enhanced photo mode.”

September and October are some of the most exciting months of the year if you’ve been waiting all year to see the latest and greatest tech, even if that just means meeting the annual new iPhone.

Of course, events are also planned for entertainment, cars, and more, and you’ll be able to catch all the latest news on major events and conferences here on The Verge.

Amazon was keeping close guard over its new Echo Hub smart controller in the demo room at today’s big hardware event. But I managed to get a few seconds of hands-on with a working tabletop unit before it was whisked away. I also put it through its paces on the wall-mounted version, and while it responded to touches promptly in some cases, it’s no iPad — or even Fire tablet.

Maybe it’s asking too much to have a powerful tablet that controls your whole smart home, mounted on your wall, for under $180. The Echo Hub did promptly turn on a nearby lamp when I tapped “on.” It swiftly activated a Baby Crying Routine that started lullabies playing on an Echo Show 5. It accepted swipes and presses with good response times — faster than the current Echo Show 15, the closest comparable smart display. But when I tried to tap, swipe, tap again, and interact with it like you would a smartphone or tablet, it started to get very confused the faster I moved.

Amazon’s Alexa is about to come out of its shell, and what emerges could be very interesting. At its fall hardware event Wednesday, the company revealed an all-new Alexa voice assistant powered by its new Alexa large language model. According to Dave Limp, Amazon’s current SVP of devices and services, this new Alexa can understand conversational phrases and respond appropriately, interpret context more effectively, and complete multiple requests from one command. 

Voice assistants need a shake-up. A general lack of innovation and barely imperceptible improvements around comprehension have turned them into basic tools instead of the exciting technological advancements we hoped for when they broke onto the scene over a decade ago.

And Echo Show 8 makes three! Amazon now has three smart home hubs, with the Echo Show 8 (third-gen) joining the newly announced Echo Hub and existing fourth-gen Echo smart speaker in sporting both Thread and Zigbee connectivity. These wireless radios, along with Bluetooth LE, Wi-Fi, and Sidewalk, mean the new Show 8 can be used to set up and control almost any smart home device (sorry, Z-Wave).

This also rounds out Amazon’s Echo options that fully support the new smart home standard Matter (over both Thread and Wi-Fi) quite nicely, although one at a lower price point than $100 would be good.

During Amazon’s fall hardware event, the company announced a batch of new smart home devices across its Echo, Fire, Eero, and Blink lines. While some of these Amazon product announcements have led to a deluge of Alexa-infused smart home tech, this year’s event was slightly more subdued, with a lot of time dedicated to Amazon’s new large language model developments. But Amazon still found the time to unveil a bunch of new devices, including a third-gen Echo Show 8, a smart home controller, a pair of kid-friendly tablets, Fire TV Sticks, a Fire TV Soundbar, and more.

Some of these devices are coming as soon as October (with one exception that’s already in stock today). And while we’ll have to review them to see just how well they perform, here’s what you need to know about these new devices and how to get them if you’re already living that Alexa life and primed to be an early adopter.

Soundbars are tricky. They need to be big enough that they sound better than the dinky speakers on your TV, but they need to be cheap enough that you don’t balk at upgrading your sound after just spending a lot of money on a TV. I didn’t get to spend enough time with Amazon’s $119.99 Fire TV Soundbar, but I can confirm it sounds bigger than it looks.

What I didn’t hear was a lot of detail. Voices rumble with appropriate amounts of bass — but in the very audio-unfriendly environment we listened to the soundbar in, dialogue was a little harder to track.

As soon as I put on Amazon’s new Echo Frames, I did the only thing you should do in that situation: I hit the button on the glasses’ left stem to turn the volume all the way up, and I said, “Alexa, play Taylor Swift.” A couple of seconds later, “Lavender Haze” was blaring out of the Frames’ internal speakers, but only I could hear it.

Okay: blaring might be a little much. The $269.99 Echo Frames, Amazon’s latest smart glasses with the Alexa voice assistant built in, won’t exactly blow your eardrums off with their booming sound. I’d describe it more like coffee-shop music — that ambient playlist meant to be heard but not the only thing you hear — but for your ears only. Amazon’s trying to create the same kind of open-ear “personal audio environment” that you’ll find on Meta’s Stories glasses or the Bose Frames line. The sound is good, and even the people standing a few feet away from me at Amazon’s device launch event couldn’t hear it, but no pair of audio sunglasses is going to outshine your headphones anytime soon.

Eero has announced a powerful new top-of-the-line router called the Eero Max 7. It’s Eero’s first router to support the new Wi-Fi 7 standard, and it includes more networking options than the typical Eero unit.

The Max 7 has three wireless bands — 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz — and Eero says the router is capable of “up to 4.3 Gbps” wireless throughput and “up to 9.4 Gbps” when wired. The company says it can cover 2,500 square feet per router or up to 7,500 square feet with a three-pack. Eero didn’t specify how much channel bandwidth the router can support, but the Wi-Fi 7 spec offers 320MHz channels.

Amazon just announced the Ring Stick Up Cam Pro at its September 2023 event, and the big new feature is the addition of radar sensors that will help with detecting motion.

Amazon says in a press release that the radar sensors will help the camera “measure the distance of an object in its field of view.” With that improved sensing, you’ll be able to set more specific areas for the Stick Up Cam Pro to watch for motion, which could be useful if you want your security camera to keep an eye on a specific spot in your yard.

Amazon Echo smart speakers are getting a new feature soon: automatic lighting. Smart lighting is one of the most popular use cases in the smart home, but it can be fiddly to set up and frustrating to control. With this new capability, Amazon is looking to make it as easy as just buying and screwing in a lightbulb.

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 came during an event held at Amazon’s new headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and via a blog post on Amazon.com from Melissa Cha, VP of smart home at Amazon.

Amazon announced the Echo Hub ($179.99) at its fall hardware event on Wednesday. Designed specifically as a smart home controller, the Echo Hub is a slimline version of an Echo Show 8 or a shrunken version of a Show 15. It should sit flush on your wall or could be propped up on a table or shelf with a desktop stand. 

An eight-inch touchscreen device, the Echo Hub shares the same DNA as an Echo Show smart display, but it is fundamentally a new device. Its slim look resembles a tablet, and while it runs the same OS as the new Show 5, Dave Limp, Amazon’s SVP of devices and services, says the Echo Hub has a different processor, and there’s no camera.

Amazon Alexa is getting Emergency Assist, a new feature announced during the company’s 2023 hardware event that allows users to contact emergency services through their Echo device by saying, “Alexa, call for help.” The service costs $5.99 per month or $59 for an entire year.

While Alexa can’t contact 911 directly, it will connect users with an agent who can alert emergency services on their behalf. Additionally, users can pre-save essential information in the Alexa app, such as their home address, gate code, the medications they’re taking, and any allergies they may have, which Emergency Assist will relay to first responders. The service will also inform responders which device the call was made from.

Today, Amazon is introducing its latest streaming players, the upgraded Fire TV Stick 4K ($49.99) and Fire TV Stick 4K Max ($59.99). During the company’s fall hardware event, Amazon’s Daniel Rausch said both devices feature upgraded processors for faster performance compared to their predecessors.

The standard Fire TV Stick 4K is 30 percent more powerful than the previous model, offers Wi-Fi 6, and 4K streaming along with broad HDR support for Dolby Vision, HDR10, and HDR10 Plus. The Max builds on top of that with Wi-Fi 6E and twice the storage (now 16GB) than the prior version. For a difference of just $10, I’m not sure who wouldn’t opt for the Max over the regular stick, but not everyone needs those frills for all of their TVs, I suppose.