This is the new "home phone".

What's the point of a home phone when everybody in the home already has a personal phone? We don't call houses. We call people.

You are forgetting an important demographic of many households who do not yet have personal phones but are perfectly capable of communicating verbally: small children.

Amazon is betting on these children growing up with an Echo in the home which can be a nice way to catch up with your kids' activities while still at work or on your way home.

Child: "Alexa, record a message for mom."

Alexa: "Recording message."

Child: "Mummy, don't be late. But you promised to undo my hair when you return from work. My head hurts."

Also, old people and seniors who have trouble using small cellphones.

Ever tried using FaceTime or Skype with poor vision/ dexterity?

So the solution is a device that has a screen on it that is barely bigger then my phone's?

When I talk to my mother or father, we both put each other on speakerphone. On my end, my wife and I can both talk at the sime time... on their end, they can also have multiple people talking at the same time. This is a 2-endpoint call with 2+n users.

All Echos have better mics and better sound than my cellphone for this use.

I quite often call a house, or wish I could. We eat dinner with my mom most nights, and my grandma if she cares to come. "Whoever's there: dinner's ready!" is a message we have to send to their house, every day, and all we have to do it with is their two cell phones. I'm counting the days until we can call their Echo Dot instead.

There is a large space between sitting at my computer and talking to my wife in the grocery store vs. sitting on the couch and talking to my wife in the grocery store.

Tangential point, but Amazon wants to eliminate your spouse even going to the grocery store.

For a brief, ominous micro-second, I wondered why Amazon would want to kill my spouse.

Tangential point, but Amazon wants to eliminate even your spouse.

Edit: I see I wasn't the only one whose brain short-circuited for a second.

Is it not a space filled by your cellphone?

For me, it is certainly filled by my cellphone. But I can see the method to their madness.

An Amazon Echo isn't a needed device. It just makes certain actions easier (e.g. playing music, checking the weather, listening to the news, etc), all of which can be satisfied with a cellphone and computer too. But the key is, it makes these actions EASIER.

For someone who's already indoctrinated to an Amazon Echo device, I can see the barrier for purchase being lower than someone who doesn't have one. For such a customer, the appeal again is that it makes even more actions EASIER.

Being able to see your baby monitor, make a phone call, check the news, see who's at your front door (integration with doorbell video services coming up, I'll bet!), etc, are all achievable by other means. But this family of devices makes them all EASIER.

I think that's the key here. And granted, these devices aren't going to appeal to everyone. But for those that already have the gateway drug/device that is an Amazon Echo, I can see them investing further into this ecosystem of devices.

My use case is walking around the house, remembering we need something at the store, telling Alexa about it, and then looking at the Alexa app when I get to the store. I don't walk around the house with my phone in my hand.

Yes, with a teeny bit of extra convenience. These things are a cellphone on the bookshelf that you don't have to hold or recharge. Also, bigger screen and better speaker.

HN isn't really a kid friendly community, but this would work pretty well for kids age maybe 3 to 10 who just want to listen to music, maybe video call grandma.

Sort of a post-iPad reaction to the failure of tablets.

This looks like an iPad / tablet charging stand with speakers and better mic -- which there are plenty of in the market. You can get one of these for $20 (or $99 if Apple makes it!). Amazon is just hoping that the success of Echo will push this forward. This will be another Fire incident for Amazon.

>This will be another Fire incident for Amazon.

Disagree. This is entering a far less saturated somewhat new market. A very focused communication/consumption device where the tablet is trying to be a laptop.

hands free...one click answer on other end.

for that they have facetime or duo? I mean if 2 users using this are out, why use amazon app to make calls?