Alexa in your glasses is no longer the lark it once was, and the latest Echo Frames shows how much Amazon’s line of smart glasses has matured, complete with improved battery life, better audio, and more style choices.
Set to arrive with a starting price tag of $269.99 (same as the previous version), the third-generation Echo Frames will come in two flavors: the standard Echo Frames edition, and Carrera Smart Glasses, with the latter costing a cool $389.99 each.
Among the biggest headlines for the new Echo Frames is better battery life, with Amazon promising up to six hours of media playback or talk time on a single charge, an improvement in playback and talk time of up to 40 percent and 80 percent (respectively) compared to the second-gen Echo Frames.
In another welcome change, the redesigned charging stand should offer more reliability than the finicky magnetic charging cable that came with the previous version.
Amazon
The revamped Echo Frames also come with a more svelte design, with temples that are 15 percent slimmer than those on the second-gen Frames–and this despite the fact that the temples now house the eyewear’s circuitry, which used to reside in the front frames.
Besides the redesigned temples, the Frames’s speaker drivers and “open-air” audio architecture got overhauled as well, resulting in (Amazon claims) three times the bass response plus better overall audio quality, all while cutting down on any audio detectable by passersby.
Another improvement involves wake word recognition, with the Echo Frames’s ability to detect the “Alexa” wake word boosted by a factor of 10 compared to the last-gen version (again, according to Amazon).
Other new features include multipoint connections, allowing the Echo Frames to connect to two audio sources–such as your phone and a laptop–at once, meaning no need to fiddle with the settings when playing audio on one device or the other.
Also, a double-press on the back action button of the Frames will tee up a recommended playlist, and if you misplace your glasses, Alexa will be able to tell you their last known location.
The third-generation Echo Frames will be available in seven new frame styles, with two of them coming from Carrera, the luxury brand from Italian eyewear maker Safilo.
You can choose between blue light-filtering lenses, sunglasses lenses, or prescription-ready frames.
Author: Ben Patterson, Senior Writer, TechHive
Ben has been writing about technology and consumer electronics for more than 20 years. A PCWorld contributor since 2014, Ben joined TechHive in 2019, where he has covered everything from smart speakers and soundbars to smart lights and security cameras. Ben's articles have also appeared in PC Magazine, TIME, Wired, CNET, Men's Fitness, Mobile Magazine, and more. Ben holds a master's degree in English literature.