Amazon's 2014 Echo listened only for its wake word

The conversation

Amazon introduced the Echo speaker and its voice service, later named Alexa, on 6 November 2014. Amazon's own product page for the device, captured five days later and no longer live at its original address, describes Echo as "always ready, connected and fast," priced at $199 ($99 for Prime members "for a limited time"), and available "by invitation only" to start. Contemporaneous reporting in Bloomberg Businessweek, published the same day as the announcement, confirms the invite-only rollout and price, and reports Amazon had been developing the device for at least four years under the internal name Project D.

What the documents show

Amazon's own page states that "Echo begins working as soon as it hears you say the wake word, 'Alexa,'" and lists the device's launch capabilities plainly: "news, weather, and information," music from "Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio," "voice-controlled alarms, timers, shopping and to-do lists," and "questions and answers" drawing on "Wikipedia, definitions, answers to common questions, and more." The same page states "Echo's brain is in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time," closing its feature list with "more coming soon," an acknowledgment that the launch capability set was a starting point rather than a finished scope.

The system boundary

Amazon's page describes the invocation model precisely: an array of seven microphones under the light ring listens continuously using "beam-forming technology" and "enhanced noise cancellation," but the device is described as only beginning to act once it hears the specific wake word. Outside that trigger, and outside the named categories of weather, news, music, timers, lists, and reference questions, the launch page describes no general capability; anything else depended on Amazon adding it later through the cloud-connected update path the page itself describes.

Where it fails

Both documents frame Echo as a new kind of always-on home device rather than a phone feature: Businessweek compares the always-listening design to Google Now while noting Amazon's own caution, requiring an application rather than an open sale, after a costly prior hardware misstep. Neither source supports attributing to this 2014 launch any capability, such as smart-home control or third-party skills, that Amazon introduced in later years under the same product name.

• Does a claim about "Alexa" specify which year's capability set it is describing?
• What does the source say happens to a request outside the device's named launch categories?
• Is continuous listening for a wake word being described accurately as a trigger, rather than as the device acting on everything it hears?

Read against its own launch materials, Echo in November 2014 was a narrowly scoped, cloud-dependent speaker with a fixed initial skill set and an explicit promise, not yet a record, of more to come.