Dot to Dot. With 85 minutes, the demo show. For everyone who's simply dotty and out, Alexa. Okay guys, this is a demo of the new Echo Show 15.
And wow, is it big. So, I've got the box here. A great big box. Flat.
We know this is a screen that you put on the wall, so unsurprisingly the box is a flat rectangle. It must be about a foot and a half wide by a foot deep, so I know what that is in old money. 30cm by 45, that sort of thing. If I pull open the flaps at the front and fold the lid back, okay, then what's filling the whole of the box is the screen.
The Echo Show 15, if I prise it out by getting my fingers down the side, I'm lifting it out. That's the screen. That's what the back sounds like. The bezel, or at least the kind of edge around the screen, is very narrow.
It's about just under a centimetre, I'd say. And the rest is screen. It's about two inches, maybe two and a half inches thick. On the back, you've got slightly sloped beveled edges around the side, so you don't see the full thickness when you look at it from the side when it's going to be mounted on the wall or propped up on the edge of a kitchen counter or something, but you would definitely want to wall mount this because there's no stability.
There's no feet on it or anything. It will fall over when it gets nudged. So this is really for wall mounting. Now, there's a cavity in the back.
It's almost circular. It's probably about two and a half inches wide, and that cavity is where you plug in the power supply, and that cavity has got a little groove coming off it that will take the, a little channel that will take the cable. Once you plug it in the back, it will allow the cable to come out and make sure that the screen doesn't have to, you know, sit too far off the wall. So yeah, you've got the circle in the middle which goes in about an inch, and it's about two and a half inches wide, and in there you've got the socket for the power, and you've got in fact two grooves, one going down and one going sideways, so you could feed the cable out in the direction that you want it to go when you're mounting it on the wall.
It's heavy, guys. This is really heavy. I looked on the specs, and it was 2.2 kilos, which is just a whisker under five pounds, so it's really heavy. Looking in the box, what's left?
Well, you've got some instructions. You've got a metal bracket. This is a metal bracket. It's very thin.
It's about just under A4 size, but it's only about an inch thick all the way around, and the rest is just a big hole in the middle, and this is a wall mounting bracket. It's got holes for screws. It's got four kind of lugs pointing upwards, which once you screw this to the wall, these four lugs will be ready for you to drop the Echo Show 15 screen onto, and it'll be nicely wall mounted. Okay, so that's the metal bracket, and apart from that, you've just got the charging brick and the cable here in the box, charging brick and the cable, with a little Velcro tie around the cable to keep it all nicely together.
So, yeah, you can mount this on the wall, guys. It's an Echo Show, obviously, so it's going to take advantage of the big screen. Obviously, it's a touch screen. It's designed to give you all of the benefits of a screen, plus some home dashboard capabilities for all of your smart home devices.
Okay, I'm going to plug it into the wall. Okay, plug it into the wall. I'm not going to mount it for this demo, but I am going to lift this big baby up off the table, rest it on its bottom edge for a second, and find the hole to plug the power into, push that in, and make sure I've fed the cable out through one of the channels, and I'm going to lie it back down again. Okay, should be booting up, guys.
Wow. Okay, so I'm just going to describe the top edge. It's like a picture frame, guys. It really is, and it's not very thick.
As I said before, the edge all around is about three centimetres, an inch and a bit. Over on the left-hand side at the top, so on the top face is the only place where there are controls, is the sliding switch for the camera. I'm sliding it, you can't hear it. The next one over is the turning her ears on and off, as we know, that's same on all of them, and then you've got the volume down, and then you've got the volume up, and they all are sitting over to the left.
There's nothing really for the majority of the top face, and there's nothing on the other faces at all. Now, it's obviously waiting to be set up. I'm just going to quickly turn on voice view, because regular listeners will know that I can't see, so I rely on voice view, so I'm just going to turn that on for the sake of this audio demo, so you'll be able to hear something. You press that mic on-off button, so that's the next one in from the slider of the camera, and you hold that in for a few seconds.
I'll do that now. It makes that noise, then you hold your fingers two fingers down on the screen and keep them there for five seconds. Keep holding down two fingers to enable voice view. Voice view ready.
Basic gestures lesson. Welcome to the voice view echo show, 15th tutorial. When voice view is turned on, you can touch the screen to learn what's under your finger. After touching an item to select it, double tap anywhere on the screen to activate it.
The tutorial is organised into lessons such as basic gestures and text entry. Each lesson has... Okay, I've just touched the screen with two fingers, so what we're going to do now is go through the process of setup, but I won't subject you to that, so I'll pause now, and we'll be back in a second. Okay, so we have just gone through the setup.
It was pretty straightforward. You wouldn't have had to go through many of these steps if you had already purchased an echo product from Amazon and set up all your information, you know, when setting up that product, because from then on, whenever you buy an echo from Amazon, you can tick a box which says, you know, use all my settings that it knows about from the Wi-Fi to location, etc. But the steps we followed here were, first of all, choosing your language, the language you want to use for setup, I guess, for the whole device, then choosing your Wi-Fi network and putting in your password, then logging in with your Amazon account, putting in your email address and password, then putting in your location so it knows where you are. Then it offers you a lot of widgets, and because it's such a nice big screen, there is a place for widgets which we'll talk about in a moment, but there are widgets about weather and smart home devices and stuff like that that you can choose from.
We actually said to skip that step for the moment. Then it asks you if you want to have the option of live streaming, which is basically being able to drop in to another echo show in the house from an echo show in a different room so that you can see that live feed of what's going on, like a baby monitor, for example. And it's slightly different from doing a call or a drop-in because it's unannounced. It'll just, you know, silently use that second echo's camera to show the picture on the echo show screen that you've called it from.
And then it takes you through a brief tutorial, stepping you through some of the things you can do with your brand new echo show. And now we're sitting on the home screen. Part of the tutorial was asking you what kind of background you wanted to it. You could have nice images, seasonal, nature, stuff like that.
That's on the left. And on the right are four blank rectangles, which is where the widgets would go. And I think that's the standard setup is that you've got such a nice big screen. On the left, you get information about the time and date and weather and stuff like that that comes up on all echo shows.
And over on the right, you've got these widgets that can control your home devices, constantly give you the weather or stocks or whatever it might be that you want. The main thing is, though, what does it sound like? So now it's set up. Let's put her through her paces.
Okay, so let's see what it sounds like. Alexa, turn off voice view. Voice view exiting. Alexa, what time is it?
The time is 1.03pm. Alexa, volume up. Alexa, what's the weather? Right now in Warwick, it's 11 degrees Celsius with cloudy skies.
Today's forecast is showers, with a high of 11 degrees and a low of 6 degrees. And we've got the visuals up on the screen. Alexa, play Meatloaf. Here's some music by Meatloaf on Amazon Music.
R.I.P. It's a nice sound, guys. R.I.P. Maybe we can talk all night.
This is about half volume. R.I.P. But that ain't getting us all over here. Alexa, stop.
R.I.P. I told you... R.I.P. Let's try a skill.
My favourite game. Alexa, open the magic door. R.I.P. Welcome back to the Haunted Lighthouse Adventure.
R.I.P. While we walk over to the chairs, Madame Pharaoh sits down and plays us a tune. Alexa, stop. R.I.P.
Okay, goodbye. R.I.P. Okay, then. So, yeah.
Really good sound. Really good visuals. R.I.P. Let's add a couple of those widgets that we skipped over in the initial setup.
R.I.P. So, I'm going to swipe down from the top of the screen to bring the control panel up. R.I.P. And now I'm going to turn on voice view so that you can hear what is on the screen, because obviously this is an audio-only demo, and also this is how I would use the Echo Show.
R.I.P. So, turn on voice view. R.I.P. Voice view ready.
106. 11 degrees. Cloudy. R.I.P.
Okay. So, because the Echo is now fully set up, you can use voice commands to start or stop the voice view. Just, you know, turn on voice view, turn off voice view, that sort of thing. R.I.P.
So, let's have a look at those widgets that we neglected to, or that we skipped over in the setup process. R.I.P. So, that's at the top of the control panel. R.I.P.
Settings. Button. Double-tap to activate. R.I.P.
Double-tap to activate. Let's keep swapping. R.I.P. Do not disturb.
Toggle button. Not tick. R.I.P. An easy place to do that.
R.I.P. Alarms. Button. Brightness.
Button. Notifications. Button. Widget gallery.
Button. R.I.P. Okay. Here's what we want.
Double-tap. R.I.P. 1.08. 11.
Widget gallery. Widgets panel dismissed. R.I.P. Back.
Elections. Add widget. Image button. Elections.
Widget. Details. But calendar and reminders end dash daily slash... This widget is a large widget.
Add widget. Image button. Calendar and reminders end dash daily slash monthly widget. Calendar and reminders end dash daily.
Add widget. Image button. Calendar and reminders end dash daily. Widget.
Image button. So, the several calendar-related ones are all slightly different. Cookpad recipe of the day. Cookpad.
Add widget. Image button. So, we get the title of each widget. Double-tap to activate.
Then we get the button for activating it, and then we get the description. Cookpad recipe of the day. Widget details. Button.
Favourite photos. Favourite photos. Add widget. Image button.
So, you get the idea. We can double-tap to activate. This way. So, yeah.
Really good. And that will appear on the right-hand side of the screen, with the left-hand side being available for the sort of things that you would normally get coming up information-wise, whenever you interact with your Echo Show, or just when it's, you know, offering you suggested recipes or the news headlines and things like that, the sort of things that it will do anyway. But if you want those coming up all the time, then you can have those in a widget on the right. Brilliant.
So, yeah. We have an... 109. 11 degrees.
Cloudy. Double-tap to activate. The control panel went away. Great.
So, turn off voice view. Voice view exiting. Now, even if you need voice view, guys, I wouldn't have it running all the time. I only have it on when you need to interact with the screen, because it is very verbose.
Otherwise, it will read out things all the time. Good. So, Echo Show 15. Really nice sound.
I'm not sure that you'll be able to pick that up here, but a beautiful big screen. And if you hit it on the wall, it would really look just like a, you know, small TV or picture frame, obviously showing you all kinds of useful information. And if you've got a really smart, connected home, then putting all the controls to control those devices in one place, always available, is super handy as well. And probably the main differentiating feature of this new Big Echo Show 15.
Great. Thanks a lot. This is Robin signing off. And we'll see you again soon.