Previously available by invitation only, Amazon's Echo voice-enabled device is now available to everyone for $179.99. Echo is designed around your voice and is hands-free and always on—ask for information, music, news, traffic, weather, and more from across the room and get results instantly. Echo uses far-field voice recognition with an array of seven microphones to hear you around the room. Beam-forming technology combines the signals from the individual microphones to suppress noise, reverberation, and even competing speech. Echo’s audio design includes dual downward-firing speakers that produce omni-directional audio.

At launch, Echo introduced hands-free voice control for music (Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn), information from Wikipedia and the web, weather, timers and alarms, news, and shopping/to-do lists. Over the last seven months, Alexa has added dozens of new features to expand its skillset, gotten better at answering all types of questions, and improved accuracy and speech recognition. New capabilities added since November include:

• Connected home: With integration of Belkin WeMo and Philips Hue products, use Echo to switch on the lamp before getting out of bed or turn on the fan or heater while reading in your chair.
• Pandora: Access Pandora’s library of over 1 million tracks by asking Alexa for a station by genre, artist, or song. Once music is playing, you can pause and skip tracks using voice commands, and tell Alexa to give a track a thumbs up or thumbs down to train the station to your taste
• Audible: Listen to audiobooks from Audible with Echo. Say "Alexa, read my book." Echo also supports Whispersync for Voice, which allows you to switch between reading and listening without losing your spot.
• Google Calendar: Access your Google calendar events with Echo
• If This Then That (IFTTT): Create IFTTT recipes using Echo’s Shopping and To-do Lists. IFTTT is a service that connects your devices, apps, and websites with simple rules called "recipes." With IFTTT recipes, you can use Echo to add shopping items to Evernote, automatically email your to-do list to your spouse, add your Echo to-do list to your iPhone, and more.
• Re-order Prime-eligible products: If you’re low on kitchen supplies, ask Echo to place an order for you. Echo uses your order history and can order the Prime-eligible item for you using your default payment and shipping settings.
• Sports scores and schedules: Alexa will tell you the results of your favorite team’s last game, the current score of a game they are playing, and the time and date of the next game.
• Traffic: Just save your work address and Alexa will tell you the quickest route and travel time to work each morning so you know exactly what to expect before leaving the house.
• Prime Stations: Prime members can ask Echo to play ad-free, personalized streaming music stations via Prime Music.
• Customized news: You can now hear from more sources in your news Flash Briefing including The Economist, NPR Business, TMZ, and ESPN Radio via TuneIn.
  

Amazon Echo is $179.99 and is available in the US to pre-order today at www.amazon.com/echo. It will start shipping July 14.