Amazon is done selling you one smart speaker and hoping it fits everywhere. On Wednesday, the company unveiled five new Alexa-powered devices, each aimed at a specific room and a specific routine, according to Reuters.

The headliner is the Echo Show 16, a 16-inch smart display with Fire TV built in and Amazon's first Echo Show camera with night vision, available for pre-order from $499.99. According to iClarified, it can switch between a family organizer, a photo frame, and a smart-home dashboard with a 3D Alexa Home Map, and a Nanomatte version for $569.99 cuts glare by more than 90 percent — with $100 off pre-orders for now.

The rest of the lineup fills the gaps around it. The new Echo Dot, at $99.99, adds a built-in smart-home hub and a Wi-Fi extender for the first time. The Echo Studio gains a camera for $249.99, letting Alexa recognize objects held up to it and letting you check on a room remotely. Echo Time, a $199.99 bedside clock, uses sleep sensing to wake you during lighter sleep — no wearable required. And the Alexa Photo Frame, starting at $199.99, syncs pictures automatically from Amazon Photos.

The strategy here is less about any single device than about the bundle. Amazon is betting that Alexa's latest version is most useful when it is woven into the places you already live: the kitchen wall, the bedroom, the shelf where the family photos sit. That is also a defensive move. Apple launched its $299 HomeView earlier this month, with a 7-inch screen and face recognition, and it reaches stores November 13, according to iClarified — while, as Reuters notes, AI companies such as OpenAI have hardware ambitions of their own.

The open question is the one hanging over every camera-and-microphone in the house: how much of this convenience people actually want in the bedroom and the living room, especially from a speaker that can now see. Amazon's answer, at least in hardware terms, is a mute button and an LED that shows when images are streaming to the cloud. Whether that is enough will be decided not in a press release, but on nightstands.

What to watch: whether the Echo Show 16's pre-order discount holds through the holidays, how HomeView's launch compares in November, and whether the room-by-room approach sells better than the old one-speaker-fits-all pitch.

— via Reuters