We don’t know what the market is for eyewear with built-in open ear speakers, but the niche category has gotten a few extra players since Bose launched theirs a few years back, with JLab, Razer, and even Amazon joining the fray, among a few others. The Amazon Echo Frames, in fact, is set to release its third generation later in the year.
That’s right, Amazon is updating their “smart audio glasses,” which now get more choices in frame styles, longer battery life, and redesigned audio, making for quite a significant update to the wearable. Do note, while they offer new frame styles, the temples remain particularly thick, since all those electronics still take up a beefy amount of space.
The new Amazon Echo Frames are fitted with the next generation of the outfit’s open-ear speakers, which direct sound to the ears without covering them while minimizing the amount of sound that leaks out for other people to hear. According to Amazon, the updated speakers get new drivers that deliver improved bass, clearer highs, and an overall more balanced sound, while coming with an enhanced dipole port design that better directs the sound straight to your ears for a more discreet listening experience.
They pair the speakers with four beamforming mics (two in each temple) for picking up your voice, along with an optimized multi-band compressor and automatic gain control that allows it to ensures louder voice calls even in outdoor conditions. It also comes with proprietary onboard speech processing that, the outfit claims, allow it to more quickly detect and recognize your wake word even in noisy environments, which is likely to happen since you’re wearing these things all through the day. In case you’re unfamiliar, the wake word is for bringing up Alexa, since the glasses get full access to Amazon’s voice assistant (via your phone, rather than onboard).
The Amazon Echo Frames come with multi-point Bluetooth, which should allow it to pair with more than one device simultaneously, so you can quickly switch from your phone to your laptop in a jiffy, while an IPX4-rated water resistant construction ensures it can shrug off water and sweat. The onboard battery is rated at six hours of continuous media playback at 80 percent volume, which is a nice improvement from its predecessor, with the glasses able to charge fully in just 2.5 hours using a 5W adapter. It also comes with action buttons, which you can use to mute the mics for privacy, among other things. Each pair of audio glasses will need to be activated upon receipt, which you can do via the Alexa app (iOS and Android).
The frame for the audio glasses are available in five styles, namely a black rectangle, a black square, a blue round, a brown cat eye, and a gray rectangle, each of which is made with high-quality acetate, German-engineered spring hinges, and premium metal tone finishes. Those frames can paired with either blue light filtering lenses, prescription lenses, or tinted sunglasses for sun protection.
The Amazon Echo Frames are slated to come later in the year.
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