Amazon Launches Battery-Powered Echo in India

Last Wednesday, the e-commerce company launched the Echo Input Portable Smart Speaker Edition, which provides up to 10 hours of continuous music playback time and is another way to get Alexa anywhere in the house.

The new device addresses a highly requested feature from customers, which is portability.

“Portability has been one of the most requested features in India,” Amazon’s Alexa devices VP Miriam Daniel said, according to TechCrunch. “You want to be able to carry Alexa with you from room to room within your homes. So we have designed something just for you.”

Just like any of the other Amazon speaker devices, the Echo Input Portable speaker allows people to voice control their music, ask Alexa to answer questions, check the weather, read the news, and more.

“Typically kids, they don’t remain in the same place — either to do studies or to do their homework or even to play, they just move around the place inside the home. And we believe that the kids could just carry this one from one room to another room as they casually start learning,” said Parag Gupta, Head of Amazon Devices India, during a media briefing in New Delhi.

Amazon has invested upwards of $5 billion in India and is currently one of Amazon’s biggest market. Winning that market means customizing many of the company’s products and services to align with local conditions in the nation.

In addition to opening a Web Services Cloud Region in India in 2016, Amazon announced in September that Alexa was adding support for the Hindi language, a language spoken by roughly half a billion people in India, to expand its reach in the nation.

The Echo Input Portable Smart Speaker Edition is available to order now for an introductory price of 4,999 rupees (around $70) and the item is released to ship on December 18.

Feature Image via Amazon