Amazon Bots

Amazon Bots

About this time every year, Amazon announces a slew of new products. Some of them are fairly normal: new Echo devices, smart screens, video doorbells. But sometimes the company will roll out something truly bonkers, like a flying home security drone or a Roomba-like robot with an extending periscope camera that wheels around your house. Outlandish or otherwise, the company's output offers a look at where it's headed. And this year, Amazon seems increasingly intent on becoming a home security company.

This week on Gadget Lab, WIRED senior associate reviews editor Adrienne So joins us to talk about Amazon's deluge of new products, including that absurd Astro robot.

Show Notes:

Read Lauren’s story about Amazon’s Astro robot. Check out everything Amazon announced at its September event. If for some reason you want to buy Amazon’s Ring home drone, you’ll have to get on the invite list. Here’s Adrienne’s story about the Amazon Halo fitness tracker that listens to your tone of speech. And here’s Lauren’s review of the Amazon Dash shelf. Also read Engadget’s story about how Amazon is turning into a security company.

Recommendations:

Adrienne recommends the Back Bay Tempo 30 earbuds. Mike recommends the “Folk Fabrique” playlist on Spotify. Lauren recommends Anne Helen Petersen’s column “The Counterintuitive Mechanics of Peloton Addiction” from her Substack newsletter, Culture Study.

Adrienne So can be found on Twitter @adriennemso. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys.

If you have feedback about the show, or just want to enter to win a $50 gift card, take our brief listener survey here.

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Jaksot(427)

Good Search Borrows, Great Search … Steals?

Good Search Borrows, Great Search … Steals?

Web crawling—the act of indexing information across the internet—has been around for decades. It has primarily been used by search engines like Google and nonprofits like Internet Archive and Common C...

20 Kesä 202432min

Thinking Different About Apple AI

Thinking Different About Apple AI

This week, Apple executives used the keynote address of the company’s annual developers conference to debut all of the artificial intelligence capabilities that are coming to iPhones, iPads, and Macs....

13 Kesä 202442min

Learning to Live With Google's AI Overviews

Learning to Live With Google's AI Overviews

Google has spent the past year lustily rolling out AI features across its platforms. But with each launch, it is becoming more clear that some of these so-called enhancements should have simmered a li...

6 Kesä 202431min

The Weird World of an AI Clickbait King

The Weird World of an AI Clickbait King

Domain names have value, even when the websites that were once hosted there are shut down or abandoned. Prospectors will often swoop in and snatch up an unused domain, then erect a new website filled ...

30 Touko 202438min

Everyone's Pumped About Heat Pumps

Everyone's Pumped About Heat Pumps

People everywhere are hot for heat pumps. These electric appliances—which perform the same heating and cooling tasks as traditional HVAC systems, just much more efficiently—have been outselling gas fu...

23 Touko 202437min

The End of Google Search As We Know It

The End of Google Search As We Know It

Google held its annual I/O developer event this week. The company gathered software developers, business partners, and folks from the technology press at Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, Calif...

16 Touko 202436min

How Black Twitter Defined Culture

How Black Twitter Defined Culture

For all the influence Twitter has had on our culture, no community there has made quite as much impact as Black Twitter. The virtual community grew from a loose online hangout to an influential cultur...

9 Touko 202435min

Thinking About Buying a Hybrid Car? Listen Up

Thinking About Buying a Hybrid Car? Listen Up

Back in March, the US Environmental Protection Agency finalized a long in the works rule requiring automakers here to dramatically increase the number of battery-powered vehicles they’re putting on th...

2 Touko 202429min