Amazon Puts a Camera in Its Flagship Smart Speaker

Amazon's top-tier smart speaker can now see you. The company unveiled the Echo Studio with Home Camera today, folding a built-in camera into its premium speaker line as part of a broader wave of device announcements. It's the latest version of the Echo Studio that got a full redesign last year, and this time the headline feature isn't about sound at all.

The camera is built for a few specific jobs: keeping an eye on a room while you're out, letting you show Alexa something in front of you, and eventually handling video calls on Fire TV devices, according to Amazon. That last feature is coming soon rather than at launch, but it signals where Amazon wants this device to sit — not just as a speaker that happens to have a camera bolted on, but as a hub for the kind of visual, camera-based interactions Alexa has been pushing toward.

That's a notable shift for a product category that's largely stayed audio-only. Echo speakers have had screens before, and Amazon's Echo Show line has long included cameras for video calling, but putting one in the Echo Studio specifically — the speaker Amazon positions as its best-sounding, highest-end option — blurs a line the company had mostly kept separate. You're no longer choosing between a great-sounding speaker and a camera-equipped one.

Amazon didn't neglect the audio side, either. The new Echo Studio introduces a feature called Advanced Room Adaptation, which Amazon says continuously adjusts sound output based on the characteristics of whatever room the speaker is in. There's also Adaptive Volume, which raises or lowers playback depending on where you are relative to the speaker, with the goal of keeping music or audiobooks at a consistent volume as you move around a room. Both are aimed at the same basic problem: a speaker's sound profile changes depending on where it's placed and where you're standing, and Amazon is trying to get the device to compensate for that automatically rather than making you fiddle with settings.

The Echo Studio with Home Camera costs $249.99 and comes in graphite. Amazon isn't discontinuing the camera-free model — the standard Echo Studio sticks around at $219.99, meaning there's now a clear $30 price gap tied directly to whether you want a camera watching your room.

A smarter, more connected Dot

Amazon also refreshed the Echo Dot, its smaller and cheaper speaker, with upgrades that have less to do with features you'll notice day to day and more to do with what's happening under the hood. The new Dot runs on Amazon's own AZ3 chip and picks up a fourth microphone, which Amazon says improves how well it can hear and respond to you.

The bigger change is that the Dot now doubles as a smart home hub, with support for Zigbee, Matter, and Thread — the three major standards that smart home gadgets use to talk to each other. That's a meaningful upgrade for anyone who's been buying separate hub devices to connect smart bulbs, locks, or sensors; folding that functionality into a speaker you likely already own removes a piece of hardware from the equation.

The new Dot also includes a built-in Eero Wi-Fi extender, which Amazon says can add up to 1,000 square feet of coverage. Eero is Amazon's own mesh networking brand, so this is effectively a second Amazon product getting absorbed into the Dot's feature set, alongside the smart home hub capability. It's a sign of how much Amazon is trying to consolidate into its cheapest, most ubiquitous smart speaker rather than keep those features in standalone devices.

The updated Echo Dot is available today for $99.99, in graphite, glacier white, agave green, and coral pink.

Taken together, the two updates point to a similar strategy playing out at different price points. At the high end, the Echo Studio is becoming less of a pure speaker and more of a multipurpose device that watches, listens, and connects. At the low end, the Echo Dot is quietly turning into the kind of all-in-one box — speaker, smart home hub, Wi-Fi booster — that used to require buying three separate products. Neither device is reinventing what an Echo does, but both are asking you to expect more from the one you already have sitting on a shelf.