Amazon Echoes Its Virtual Assistant Offering With The Dot

The Echo Dot is the Amazon Echo in a smaller form factor. In 2014, Amazon released a tower speaker named Echo. Housed inside of it was Alexa, the company's virtual assistant meant to take on Siri inside the iPhone and Google Now for Android. Weirdly, the Echo wasn't attached to a phone like the former two but it could still answer queries, tell jokes, and--of course--complete Amazon purchases. But that was pretty much it.