The Amazon Echo Studio's new camera can check on your dog or tell you how to play 'Monopoly'
It retains the high-quality sound and Alexa+ features of the original model.
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Amazon has significantly reworked its Echo Studio speaker as part of its big smart speaker refresh. As its new name suggests, the Echo Studio with Home Camera now has a built-in camera that can see everything in front of it. At the same time, it retains the "powerful audio architecture" of the Echo Studio designed to deliver high-quality Dolby Atmos sound and provide Alexa+ capability.
The addition of a camera adds significant functionality to the Echo Studio. The smart speaker can relay video to Live View in the Alexa app, letting you check on your cat or see if you left the lights on. It can also use Alexa+ to help you out with everyday tasks, like reordering cereal or telling you the rules for a board game.
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Echo Studio with Home Camera can also serve as a webcam for personal or business video calls. At a demo event in New York City, Amazon's head of device Panos Panay used the device to call his father, and Engadget's Cherlynn Low confirmed it was working by "waving aggressively in the background," she said. The camera on the Studio captured the event feed (complete with aggressive waving), while a connected Fire TV displayed Panay's parents.
Since Amazon has other (cheaper) Home Camera devices like the Echo Show 5, the company emphasized that the Home Studio version's main strength was still sound quality. It offers the same high-excursion woofer for "deep, immersive" bass, three full-range drivers for rich midrange and highs, plus Dolby Atmos for spatial audio.
A neat new audio trick is Advanced Room Adaptation that continuously tunes the sound to your space by adapting to the room's acoustics. Another called Adaptive Volume adjusts to where you are so music and podcasts maintain the same relative volume as you move around a room.
The Echo Studio with Camera is now available for $250, a premium of $30 over the regular Echo Studio. The latter (from 2025) remains available for $220 if you want high-quality audio but have no need for the camera feature.