Asmart ring?

What is it?

By now just about everyone’s familiar with products like Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple Homepod. With one of these devices sitting in your living room, you don’t even have to think about using a product, it’s just always there, ready to o answer questions, set music playing or even turn smart lights on and off. Amazon’s Echo Loop (pictured) does s away with the speaker ker and puts the voice assistant in a ring on your finger.

What does it do?

Like an Echo speaker, the Echo Loop listens for you saying ‘Alexa’ and then responds. It’s designed to be discreet, so you raise the ring to your mouth and press it to talk, and the reply comes in a quiet electronic voice.

What’s the catch?

The Echo Loop addresses the obvious problem with a smart speaker: you can’t carry it around with you. But there’s already a solution to that: Alexa – like Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and other rivals

– is also available in an app on your smartphone, which you can use without spending $130 (about £125 including VAT if it came to the UK) on a chunky Wi-fi ring.

So can I do without it?

Arguably, the main reason smart speakers exist is that phones are bad at responding to voice commands reliably, and just need to get better at it. If you prefer a more private form of communication than shouting ‘Alexa!’ across the room, various wireless earbuds already support voice assistants via their built-in microphones. We can’t see smart rings catching on for this reason. Squeeze in a miniature smart watch and fitness tracker, and maybe it could get interesting.