Amazon Adds an Alexa Photo Frame and a Bedside Clock to Its Echo Family

Panos Panay, Amazon's senior vice president of Devices and Alexa, says a couple hundred million people now use Alexa+, the revamped version of the decade-old voice assistant, on its Echo devices. He says people talk to Alexa+ two to three times more than before its AI glow-up, cook with it five times more, listen to music three times more, and create routines twice as much.

To keep that momentum going, Amazon has new Echo products to deliver a richer Alexa+ experience, including minor refreshes on existing hardware and entirely new categories. Announced Wednesday and available for purchase now, they include the Echo Dot ($100), Echo Studio With Home Camera ($250), Echo Show 16 ($500), Echo Time ($200), and the first Alexa Photo Frame ($200).

“I don't think anyone's really doing AI at all in the home, and if they are, they aren't doing it well,” Panay says at an intimate media-only event in New York City. As people have “deeper” conversations with Alexa+, Panay says devices need to be in premium shape—a strategy Amazon has been focusing on after announcing more premium Kindles and Alexa Tablets in early October.

You can see that premiumization in the hardware pricing: The Echo Dot—once the affordable, entry-level $50 smart speaker—now starts at $100. That's higher than the marked-up prices on existing Amazon devices from this summer, which the company blamed on the memory shortage.

Echo Dot

Panay says Amazon has sold more than 100 million Echo Dots, and in 2026 alone, people spent more than a trillion minutes listening to music on the diminutive orb. So, the main goal for the new Dot? Boost the sound. The full-range driver reportedly delivers 50 percent stronger bass performance and crisper vocals.

With four beamforming microphones (up from three) and Amazon's AZ3 chip, Alexa can isolate your voice in a noisy environment and track your commands more effectively. It also has Omnisense like last year's Echo Dot Max, which can sense the environment to, say, detect when you walk into the home and turn on the lights.

The Dot now supports the Matter standard and works as a Thread border router, turning it into a hub for setting up and controlling smart home devices. If you have an Eero router, it can also turn into a Wi-Fi extender.

It comes in four colors, three of which are calming pastels. Amazon's design head Chris Green tells WIRED that's intentional to evoke a calm, softer aesthetic, citing recent data showing nearly half of US adults are stressed once a week. Alternatively, you can buy the Kids Echo Dot, which has the same hardware but in fun designs, plus Amazon Kids+ for age-appropriate content.

Echo Studio With Home Camera

The new Echo Studio is the first Amazon smart speaker with a camera—a feature once limited to Amazon's Echo Show smart displays—allowing Alexa to identify the person making the command (along with voice recognition) for more personalized responses. That's especially important these days as Alexa+ can connect to email or calendar apps and needs to verify who's speaking before divulging personal information.

It also lets you use Live View to check in on your home and monitor pets, or video call friends and family. With no display on the Echo Studio, you'll need to pair it with a Fire TV or use your smartphone to view the camera feed of the person you're calling—as seen in the picture above when Panay used the Studio to Drop In on his dad. This “Drop In” feature will arrive later through a software update.

The camera enables what Amazon calls “Advanced Room Adaptation,” which tunes the sound to the room. Even if you move around the space, the volume will stay consistent. And it can also be used for visual intelligence—just like how you might use your phone to identify an object with Google Lens, you can pick up an object and show it to Alexa through the camera, and it can identify it and answer questions. For example, show a board game you've decided to play and ask Alexa to explain the rules.

While no privacy shutter physically blocks the camera, you can press a button to turn off the mics and camera, and an LED lights up when the camera is on and in use. If you don't want yet another camera in your home, Amazon says you can buy the standard Echo Studio. The speaker is otherwise very similar to the 2025 model and is meant to be the top-end option for folks who want even better audio quality.

Alexa Photo Frame

Digital photo frames are a well-established category now, with companies like Aura and Skylight leading the market. Now Amazon's entering the fray with the Alexa Photo Frame. Yes, you can still talk to Alexa just like any other Echo device, but the 10-inch display will always show your photos—nothing else. The bottom edge lights up when Alexa activates, and you can ask it the weather or to show you pictures of your dog last Halloween.

The caveat is that you need to use Amazon Photos. Once your images are in Amazon Photos, you can choose who and what appears on the frame—even newly captured photos so Mom can see the latest pics from your vacation before she even asks. The display is a semi-matte, anti-glare touchscreen that adjusts brightness based on the room's ambient light, and you can swipe the screen to see more images. Tap an image to play a voice note tied to the picture—that's something you can add in the Amazon Photos app, but a future update will let users add voice notes to images straight on the Alexa Photo Frame.

Smart curation happens in the background to choose the best photos. For example, if you have a lot of vertical images, it will stack them side by side and group familiar faces together. Maybe that means a pic of your kid when they were 8 years old, and the pic on the right of when they're 14. (Though Google has been doing this for years on its smart displays.) Alexa knows to choose pictures of people smiling, and understands timing—you'll be served last year's Halloween pictures around this time of year.

Amazon says it's easy to set up for someone else—like your grandparents—and the frame comes in three styles: black, birch, or walnut.

Echo Time

The other entirely new product is the Echo Time. It's similar in size and sound to the Echo Dot, but with a digital clock screen. No cameras here—it's designed for the bedside table, after all—and the 3.2-inch circular display can dim as low as 0.3 nits (the same as Apple's new HomeView).

It's hardly the first time Amazon has dabbled with clocks on an Echo (see the Echo Spot), and Amazon even sold a bedside sleep tracker before discontinuing it barely a year later.

The Echo Time doesn't track your sleep, but it can help you start a bedtime routine as you wind down. The embedded ultrasonic transducer can detect your breathing to identify when you're in a light sleep stage and gently wake you up within 10 to 60 minutes of your alarm, rather than forcing you out of deep sleep. These “Smart Alarms” are increasingly common on fitness trackers, like Google's Fitbit Air, but the pitch here is that you don't need a gadget on your wrist. Sadly, these features work only for the person closest to the Echo Time; with two people in bed, you'll need two Echo Time units—one on each nightstand.

You can choose from hundreds of clock faces, set up alarms with Alexa+, and ask the assistant to remind you about certain things when it wakes you up—like grabbing lunch from the fridge before heading out. Alexa can play soothing soundscapes to lull you to sleep like a sound machine. And when you wake up, you can tap the top of the device to snooze it (up to four times).

There's a Kids Echo Time with wacky designs and more limited features constrained to Amazon's Kids+ service. Kids can set their own alarms, ask for the weather forecast, and customize clock faces, but the main highlight is Sleep Studio. This connects to content from apps like Calm, Headspace, and Moshi to help kids wind down and fall asleep.

Echo Show 16

Finally, there's the Echo Show 16. Yes, it's a bigger smart display, but Panay says Amazon has redesigned the entire experience from the ground up. This specific model is designed to be wall-mounted, though you can buy a kickstand if you'd prefer. It starts at $500, but Amazon has introductory pricing of $400; the version with the Nanomatte anti-glare display (like the one on the Alexa Tablet Pro 12) costs $550.

It has slimmer bezels, a thinner frame, and an entirely new audio system with eight woofers and two tweeters. The 13-megapixel camera can supposedly identify people from up to 17 feet away, so you won't have to walk really close to the screen to see your personalized information. It also supports night vision, so you can use Live View to check in on your home and still see in the dark.

A full built-in Fire TV experience lets you watch as much content as you want while cooking, or follow along with recipes with Alexa. One big focus of the redesign was letting users prioritize the features they use the most. Want to use it as a smart home controller? There's a dashboard that shows all your controls as your primary “Screen Style.” Parents who prefer to use it as a calendar can set the “Family Organizer” screen as the main display. Or just let it turn into a digital photo frame with the Photos Screen Style.

More unique is the AI-generated interface Amazon is debuting with Alexa+ called “Neo.” Instead of a basic chat transcript like most other chatbots, Alexa+ will create charts, generate images, and offer other visuals to zhuzh up its responses during more complex conversations. (That's something Google and OpenAI have also played up with recent updates to Search and ChatGPT.) These “Cards" will also appear in your Alexa app so you can revisit them at any time.

A Reuters report earlier this year revealed details that Amazon was working on a smartphone, codenamed Transformer, with Alexa+ as the focus of the experience and a generative user interface. “Neo” on the Echo Show 16 gives us a first glimpse of what that might look like, and paired with many of the Alexa+ features introduced on the recent Alexa Tablet Pro 12, it feels like the Amazon smartphone is closer than ever.

I asked Panay point-blank whether Amazon was making a phone, and while he said there was “no intent," he pointed out that all of the new software experiences are “scalable.” He then asked to look at the iPhone Duo I was holding and remarked that it was similar in size to the Surface Duo, which Panay helmed at Microsoft. There may be “no intent” on paper, but it sure seems like he wants to make a phone again.