Amazon has been a giant in its online shopping industry for long now, yet its foray into creation of a unique hardware device has taken a lot of effort. The Echo product has always been backed to the hilt by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, but the product languished within the lab for years until it emerged as another ground breaking business innovation from the company’s stables. Echo’s model is based around a voice recognition system which prompts the virtual assistant named Alexa to perform household tasks. Its response time to voice recognition is now noticeably less than Apple’s Siri Microsoft’s Kinect or Google’s Voice Search. Amazon believes that voice is going to be the next big thing and thus has invested right on time.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.in/The-inside-story-of-how-Amazon-created-Echo-the-next-billion-dollar-business-no-one-saw-coming/articleshow/51664080.cms