Amazon Echo voice-controlled smart speaker comes to UK and Germany

Amazon is to start selling its voice controlled speaker the Amazon Echo in the UK and Germany. Amazon Echo is a cylindrical, voice-controlled speaker which also increasingly functions as a smart home digital assistant. Triggered by someone saying the name Alexa (or Amazon, or Echo) it can play music you ask for from services like Amazon Music and Spotify, or play audio books from Audible. When it detects the wake word, Echo's light ring turns blue and begins streaming the request to the cloud: the spoken request is sent to Amazon Web Services to process it and respond, using a neural network-based speech recognition system to recognise what is being asked for. The device can respond to questions such as "Alexa, will it rain tomorrow?",