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The Amazon Echo is now available to everyone for purchase. When it was launched last year the program was invitation only and the price point was at $ 199. Today the price has been lowered to $ 179 to everyone and $ 149 to Amazon Prime Members. Below is the link and letter from Jeff Bezos.

http://www.amazon.com/ [amazon.com]

"Dear Customers,

Today, we are excited to announce that Amazon Echo is available to everyone.

We launched Echo as an invitation-only program in November to learn how customers would use and enjoy it most. The response has been overwhelming.

Echo was born from a simple idea: create a computer, controlled entirely by your voice. This idea required some incredible invention. It had to understand natural language requests, from many voices, from across a room, even when music is playing. It also needed to be informative, entertaining, and useful—while always getting smarter.

With seven microphones, beam-forming technology, and noise cancellation, Echo achieved this goal by enabling far-field voice recognition. And Alexa, our cloud-based voice service that powers Echo, provides information, music, news, weather, and more—and she is constantly learning new skills.

Since launch, we have added streaming music from Pandora, audiobooks from Audible, calendar access, live sports scores and schedules, traffic reports, Amazon.com re-ordering, control of connected devices such as lights and switches from WeMo and Philips Hue, and more. Many of these features are a result of feedback and suggestions from our customers—thank you.

I am excited by what the team has done in a short period of time with your help—and we’re just getting started. We hope you enjoy Amazon Echo.

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO"