This means existing owners of the speakers will be able to jump aboard the smart speaker craze — and use their Libratone Zipps like an Amazon Echo and ask Alexa to do stuff like look up sports scores, tell a joke, provide a weather update or indeed order something from Amazon.com.
Although — unlike Amazon’s Echo speakers — the Libratone Zipps do not have built-in microphones that are persistently listening for a trigger word.
The company confirmed that users wanting to talk to Alexa will therefore have to manually touch a button on the top of the speaker to do so. So while the quality of Libratone’s audio is more premium than Amazon’s Echo speaker hardware, its existing microphones (previously used to support a conference call functionality) aren’t as tuned for this use-case — ergo there will be more friction between you and Alexa’s ‘lazy web’ answers to your voice commands.
