Tech Preview: Amazon Echo Show 5

It’s almost 2020 and robots are becoming babysitters. I made this discovery when I found my 9-year-old daughter deep in conversation with Alexa. She’d put a bow on the speaker’s head, in an attempt to humanise this tub of circuits, and was asking it questions about dolphins. The new Echo Show, Amazon’s €89.99 smart speaker, hooks up to a peripheral baby camera. “Alexa, show me the nursery camera,” you ask. Alexa presumably complies.

Show 5 is great for adult routines too: from turning off bedroom lamps at bedtime to showing the weather forecast in the morning. I find Alexa at her most useful when playing songs from Spotify or Amazon Music. Having a 5.5” display and HD camera is handy for watching Prime Video and short news clips from Reuters, BBC News and RTÉ. You can make hands-free calls to friends and family via Skype.

Amazon has promised new features for Echo Show 5. These include “how-to” videos from wikiHow (everything from tips on meditation to cutting up mangos). There are new privacy options as well: you can ask Alexa to delete “everything I said today”. Whether or not this will keep nosy tech giants out of our personal data remains to be seen.