Have you ever seen a movie where someone enters a posh home and immediately uses a big control panel to secure their house, turn on their lights, get news updates, and so on? That's essentially what a smart home hub does, and you can get one now at a great price if you want. The Amazon Echo Hub is a central control panel that connects all the smart home devices in your house, and right now it's on sale for just 125 on Amazon. Whether you place it by the door or put it in your bedroom, it doesn't matter because it just works. The Echo Hub's dashboard is customizable, so you can add in your favorite widgets, check in on your smart doorbell camera feed, quickly turn off the smart lights in your living room, send your smart robot vacuum on a cleaning job, or arm your security system.

Amazon's fall hardware event was chock full of updates. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the generative AI boom from the last year, the company began transforming Alexa into a much more versatile and conversational personal chatbot. But it also had plenty of new hardware to introduce, with new models of the Echo Show, security cameras, Echo Frames, a 10-gigabit router and more. Here's everything Amazon unveiled on Wednesday. As generative AI has exploded in popularity during the last year, task-focused personal assistants like Siri, Google Assistant and Alexa now seem even more dated than they did before.

Every fall, Amazon holds a "Devices and Services" media event where it unleashes a flood of new gadgets and software into the world. At the 2022 edition, Amazon announced a Kindle with a stylus, a robot dog, and a refreshed line of Echoes and Eeros, among other smart home gadgets. This year, the company was eager to prove that it hasn't been left behind by its rivals' recent advances in artificial intelligence and conversational interfaces. Executives showed off a smarter version of Alexa that's been given an AI boost, as well as new smart home products that harness Amazon's computer vision, machine intelligence, and face recognition technologies. There were some stumbling blocks during the presentation, but here are the highlights of what Amazon announced today.