Amazon Echo is designed around your voice. It's always on—just ask for information, music, news, weather, and more. Echo begins working as soon as it detects the wake word. You can pick Alexa or Amazon as your wake word. Echo is also an expertly tuned speaker that can fill any room with immersive sound. Tucked under Echo's light ring is an array of seven microphones.

These sensors use beam-forming technology to hear you from any direction. With enhanced noise cancellation, Echo can hear you ask a question even while it's playing music. Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When Echo detects the wake word, it lights up and streams audio to the cloud, where we leverage the power of Amazon Web Services to recognize and respond to your request. Echo's brain is in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time. The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.

The Amazon Echo team is working on a public SDK to enable developers, content creators, and service providers to build apps and experiences for Amazon Echo. Starting now, we are accepting signups for a limited-participation beta ahead of the SDK's public release.  If you would like to participate you can sign up here.  Stay tuned to this blog for details on the public SDK release.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)