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Amazon Echo Adds New Voice: Spotify Premium

Echo, Amazon’s $170 wireless speaker and digital assistant, is getting a new music service: Spotify Premium.

The subscription service, requested by Echo users, joins other cloud-based music services accessed by the tube-shaped speaker via Wi-Fi. They are Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, and TuneIn.

The development follows yesterday’s announcement that Domino’s became the first quick-service restaurant to bring ordering capability to the Echo, which responds to voice commands.

With Echo now supporting Spotify, users can ask Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based personal assistant, to play any playlist, artist, or genre from Spotify’s catalog. Echo also supports Spotify Connect, which lets consumers use their mobile device’s Spotify app to select songs for playback but have Echo stream the music from the cloud. Spotify Connect preserves mobile-device battery life and prevents musical interruptions when a call comes into a smartphone.

Echo also features Bluetooth so it can play back music streamed from any Bluetooth-equipped device.

Echo also lets users ask Alexa to search for information from Wikipedia and the web, including news, weather reports, sports updates and scores. It also controls smart-home devices, sets timers and alarms, retrieves shopping and to-do lists, play back Audible books, access calendar entries, and more.

The latest developments precede the expected launch of a little brother to the Echo.

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