what's the weather like I was one of the lucky ones to get the Amazon Echo Frames early
on the invitation path so today I'm going to show you my first impressions
and how to set this device up and use it let's go hello Automaters thanks for
tuning in again I'm Brian from automate your life and today I'm going to take
the frustration out of automation by showing you something brand-new from
Amazon now I did open the device briefly yesterday just to take a couple of quick
photos like I'm sorry I couldn't wait and so now we're going to get right into
some of the details I'm gonna show you what the product looks like we're gonna
set it up and then we are going to walk through what you can do and my first
impressions of this new Echo Frames product from Amazon so inside the box you actually do
get two separate cards here there's one to take it to your optician this
actually tells you that you can only really heat the back end of the frames
I'll show you what I mean by that in a second but otherwise they're saying also
you can't put it in the ultrasonic cleaner so there's some specific
maintenance components to these glasses because they are electronics now the
other thing is three steps to get it set up that's a very quick easy card to
follow kind of your standard process for most of your echo devices now you do
also get a very specific charging cable here and this is gonna be a little hard
to show but this is a magnetic attachment so it will actually
magnetically attached to the frames click and this is obviously just a
standard USB and you're getting the standard USB charger this is a 100 volt
to 240 volt 0.15 amp is what I think it said on there yeah other things in the
Box you do get a basic user guide which will kind of tell you what you're able
to do with the device it's actually really handy because there is a lot of
complexity on these glasses you also do get a cleaning cloth now I also got in
it a card from my friend Frank angleman who sent these up from the you
for us so they are not delivering internationally but it helps to have a
friend like Frank who helps seniors out I'll leave a link down to his his
website he has done a lot of work with seniors now let's get into the actual
glasses I did charge them previously you do have to charge these glasses play my
last book well we got to do this which I'm gonna put down my glasses I can't
see anything at this point but here we go there's a little light on the inside
now what I did is there's a little button over here I press that button
just for a second I have a little flashing light here in front of my eye
it's going blue and red very similar to what you get with the Amazon Echo
devices in general but it's prompted me to go ahead into the Amazon Alexa voice
assistant application and get these set up now what's interesting about this
setup process is as soon as I powered those on and I was in Amazon's Alexa voice
assistant application it found the Echo Frames now if it doesn't you can go
through the standard process of going to the devices page hitting plus going to
Echo and choosing the Echo Frames now I'm in Canada guys so I managed to get
this working by changing my account to a USA account actually but I'm going to
hit the setup button and it's saying we're gonna set up these
frames so very simple process so now we're just connecting through bluetooth
to these frames and actually as you sit here you can hear the glasses telling
you I'm not able to maintain a connection or I'm not connected yet
please make that connection so you do have to make sure that you pair and
allow your pairing to occur through your phone so you could have a little bit of
trouble there initially I think in most cases it's going to be very seamless for
people so it just went through the setup process I'm all finished you guys have
seen that and I'm ready to start using the device now there's a couple of
buttons and some things that they informed me very quickly about how you
control there's actually a swipe ability on this this is kind of a control
interface in and of itself so do that again you'll hear a sound now at
the very bottom is the action button so you can press that to actually enable
your voice assistant to start speaking and you do get this little light in here
as that occurs the other thing is these are your volume buttons on the bottom
I'm also instantly annoyed that it's all showing up here on my phone I want to
hear it in my ear so we're gonna try out a couple of things I'm gonna walk away
here for a bit and I'm gonna put in some contacts and then I'll come back and
give you my impressions of actual usage with these devices play the Foo Fighters
now you guys all know that I've been wearing glasses for a long time so when
I say that they are actually a wearable frame and I'm surprised by that there
are some caveats but in general they are about the same weight as my existing
glasses or my existing frames now they have the plastic lenses in them so they
don't have the full lens that I'm used to so that's that's really the
difference there but in general they are the same weight or a little bit under
and even with the thickness of these as long as you like the look of how it is
then I think they're an OK frame to wear that's a glass where - I mean they don't
have a true nose pad so they are always going to slide a little bit for you here
that's kind of an important component for a lot of people the other thing I
find is this very is very very smooth along these edges here but actually on
the outside when I try and do the swipe it is actually a little bit harder if I
have anything on my finger at all so that might not be the most effective
control interface I've ever seen the Bluetooth connectivity to my smartphone
seems very strong it's been very stable there was some initial setup issues
where I didn't have the sound kind of playing
out right but it just took some fiddling with the Bluetooth connection options
inside of my pixel to fix that all up and everything was good there what I
will say though if you're an iOS user guess what you can't even use the Echo
Frames with your iOS device so you do need an Android and that's a little bit
of a departure for Amazon I think what's happening here is they're really just
testing out this kind of technology they're not really trying to sell a
million of these they really just want to see what works what doesn't work
within this know the best experience I've had so far with these one of the
major reasons that I think someone might really want these is the phone call
experience you know I went and I placed a couple of phone calls here today I
used it for over an hour probably only dropped an extra 10 percent over what
I've seen kind of historically with them so far in terms of battery life and
spent that full hour talking to someone with both of my hands-free the entire
time not a very loud conversation going on so it wasn't coming through the
speaker so it's very similar to a set of earbuds the sound was very good everyone
said that I spoke to or everyone so far has said that the sound quality is every
bit as good as me talking on my phone so very powerful stuff there I was able to
hang up although this was one of the negatives I've experienced I tapped to
hang up and that was it was a mistake the first time so sorry Alan for hanging
up on you there but that's that's kind of what happens with these new devices
so yeah I would say from an overall perspective that was my favorite
experience what has been my biggest struggle so far is learning all the
different commands that I can make with them that's that's probably going to be
the the most difficult thing going forward with the tap and the swipe
functionality I have to remember a lot of different commands so that's not an
easy thing the buttons also complicate that as well and you have double clicks
to mute the action button and then you
double-click to turn that back on the mic again so there's been some learning
on the commands and I would say I'm going to have to really get used to that
as well the battery life also ran out after a few hours of pretty extensive
usage with them so the overall cost is something to talk about too as kind of a
negative here when you think about going out and getting lenses put into a set of
frames at this pricing I mean sometimes the the frames cost
that much it's kind of a designer set of frames really in the end in terms of its
pricing so you know they have this introductory pricing for the invitation
only folks who go and get this but in the end these will be two hundred and
fifty dollars u.s. so that's a pretty expensive set of frames and then to go
and add lenses to it and something that you're only going to be able to wear
kind of part of the time and have Amazon's voice assistant with you that's
probably going to make it out of the price range for most people but it is
certainly a different experience I'm enjoying the experience so far and I
think guys overall that's what I'm going to tell you are my impressions of the
Echo Frames to start off hope you've it I hope you've enjoyed this first look at
these devices and I'm really excited to see what they bring me over time in my
smart home now of course we have a ton of other reviews and other first
impression videos set up videos for Amazon and all of their Echo devices
here on automate your life so go ahead watch that and watch that playlist raid
now guys you're going to learn a ton about these devices so thanks for
watching everyone and of course don't hate automate