Amazon does away with the Dash Wand
Amazon's grocery-scanning shopping assistant will no longer be supported.
Amazon is pulling the plug on the Dash Wand, so to speak. The magnetic, battery-powered gadget was used primarily to make ordering groceries easy. You could scan the bar code of a wide variety of household items, and Amazon would find the product with that code in its catalog and order more. The Dash Wand also included Amazon's digital assistant Alexa so you could press a button to give a voice command and control your smart home .
As of Tuesday, Amazon is no longer supporting the device, according to an email the company sent to customers. The email explains how to deregister and then recycle the device.
We liked the Dash Wand when we reviewed it back in 2017. Scanning bar codes was an easy and fun way to add items to your grocery list and it was nice to have a portable way of accessing Alexa. That said, while you could access a variety of voice-activated Alexa skills with the Wand, you couldn't do some basics like play music or schedule timers.
The Wand basically paid for itself as the $20 cost up front was offset by a discount on groceries, but it's also become somewhat redundant as affordable Amazon smart speakers become more widespread. The $50 Amazon Echo Dot is often on sale for less and offers all of Alexa's capabilities, including adding things to your shopping list with a voice command. You can also access Alexa on the go via an app on your phone, so the only thing Alexa fans will lose as the Dash Wand goes away is the bar code scanner.
Amazon didn't immediately respond to CNET's request for comment.