Much as Amazon has replaced the need for stores made of brick and mortar, it has now replaced the need for friends made of flesh and blood—stupid friends, whose feeble meat-brains and lumpy carriages can now be traded in for a robot know-it-all housed in a sleek, sexy cylinder. Yesterday, Amazon introduced the Echo, a voice assistant cased inside a portable speaker that you can place in any corner of your house where useless human acquaintances once sat, filling your life with farts and ignorance. For just $100, Echo will instead fill your life with news and information, music and mirth, and the sense that you are not terribly, crushingly alone.
Like the helpful artificial intelligence from the movie Her, you can’t have sex with it. However, Echo is similarly always listening and responding in its soothing female voice, which is awakened by you calling its name with increasing, yet never fully reciprocated fondness. Right now Echo’s default “wake word” is “Alexa,” so named for Amazon’s web traffic monitor that was, until now, the company’s best way of secretly tracking your every single move. Now you can have a little robot lady in your house that does that. Amazon also promises that, soon enough, you can choose your own “wake word,” naming it after your own commercial web traffic data subsidiary, or perhaps a controlling ex-girlfriend.