New Amazon Echo Show 8 features proximity-based display, spatial audio and room calibration

Amazon at its devices and services event yesterday introduced the updated Echo Show 8. All of Amazon’s smart speakers/hubs benefit from the newly announced updates to Alexa that make it faster, more natural, conversational and responsive. However, the Echo Show 8 itself has some new tricks up its sleeve which will enhance the overall audio-visual and smart-home experience.

Starting with the sound, Amazon claims that the Echo Show 8 has “improved clarity and bass”, thanks to some clever spatial audio processing, and room adaptation, which tailors the sound as per the room’s acoustics. Both these features seem to have become almost mandatory in any new speaker these days, with varying degrees of success. Echo speakers have a solid track record with their sound quality and directional microphones, however, so we should expect good results here.

On the visual side, the Echo Show 8 has a neat trick to make the experience more responsive and personalized. Its new Adaptive Content feature uses machine vision to gauge how far away the user is, and accordingly adapts the content layout for maximum legibility, giving a more detailed view as one moves closer. It also uses visual ID, if enabled, to personalize the content to a specific user. The 13 MP camera is now centered and has auto-framing and improved background noise reduction.