Amazon is poised to enter the wireless earbuds market. The product may see the light of day only in the later part 2019. The earbuds, to be built around the proprietary voice assistant Alexa platform will resemble the AirPods of Apple, reports Bloomberg. Alexa has so far remained within the four walls of homes or at best in automobiles basically since Amazon does not enjoy the luxury of an iPhone or an Android OS run device, which Apple and Google have.
There are reports that Amazon’s earbuds may come with better audio capabilities that the AirPods. These are still rumours and the product is said to be under development at Amazon’s Lab126. In terms of their look and price too, they may be similar to AirPods with the pieces settling inside the ears comfortably without any external support. In a separate report it is said Amazon is working on a robot based on the same Alexa platform.
The Amazon earbuds can be used to give voice commands to Alexa as you would do to an Echo speaker. What’s more, the device will accept commands by gesture as well. A tap will enable answering a call on the connected mobile device and another tap to end the call. If you are listening to music the tap can be used to switch the songs as well. The reports suggest there will be a box to hold these earbuds which will also double as the charging station. The normal USB cable will do the job. There may be two colours in which the device will be released.
The next speculation will be over the price that Amazon will sell these earbuds for. Apple has its range of AirPods priced between $159 and $199. Knowing the practice followed by Amazon of undercutting prices in the marketplace, it is anybody’s guess as to what level of price Amazon will fix for its earbuds.
But Amazon faces the challenge of being handicapped without a device of its own like a smartphone to push the sale of the earbuds. It will have to work with Google and Apple to have them adopted on their devices. The segment itself is growing with many smartphones doing away with the 3.5mm audio jack. Competition will make the introduction of the earbuds by Amazon interesting to witness.