Well, the rumors are true.
Amazon made a microwave.
Specifically, the Amazon Basics microwave.
It's a $60, 700 watt microwave which Amazon tells us is the best selling size on Amazon.com, and it's gonna be one that you can connect with Alexa.
Now it doesn't have Alexa actually built in, there's no Speaker inside of this microwave so you'll need a dedicated Alexa device like the Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show in your kitchen in order to talk to the microwave and tell it to cook things.
You can say cook one potato and it'll automatically put the correct time for a potato.
You can say cook popcorn and it'll do the same thing.
It also has dash replenishment built in so if you run outta popcorn it can order more Now, the thing that really makes this microwave tick is the Alexa Connect Kit chip set.
It's a new chip that developers can use to smarten up existing appliances.
You can put this chip into your microwave, or whatever appliance or device you have, and give it Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth connectivity, all of that within Amazon's protocols and encrypted Amazon standards.
So this chip set's really just an affordable way to get more devices on board the Alexa platform.
And this microwave is sort of a showcase for that.
It's kind of proving the point that you can take a ordinary old appliance, add this chip set in, and make it an Alexa enabled appliance with a lot of appeal.
We'll see if that appeal translates to sales.
If people buy this microwave in mass maybe we'll see a flood of new Alexa enabled appliances with this chip set inside.
Time will tell once the microwave starts shipping to customers this November.
We'll get one into the cnet smarthome, test it out and let you know how it cooks up.
