Amazon moves AI into your bedroom: Alexa now wakes you and picks your photos

Amazon unveiled five new Alexa devices at once, and two of them are categories the company never had before: the Alexa Photo Frame and the Echo Time bedside alarm clock. Everything is already on sale.

The frame has a 10-inch matte anti-glare screen and decides on its own what you get to see. It pulls pictures from Amazon Photos and picks the ones where you are smiling and the light is good, and it even tracks the season, so October brings back last year's Halloween costumes instead of spring barbecues. Screenshots and receipt photos get skipped automatically. You can ask by voice for a specific person, pet or trip, and add voice notes to photos. It starts at $199.99, or $229 in birch or walnut.

Echo Time costs $199.99 ($209.99 for the kids version) and has no camera, since it is built for the bedroom. It uses ultrasound to sense your breathing, figures out when you are in lighter sleep and wakes you within a 10 to 60 minute window before your alarm. Before that, the screen slowly brightens like a sunrise.

The rest are refreshes: the $100 Echo Dot gets a built-in smart home hub and an eero Wi-Fi extender, Echo Studio now comes with a camera ($250), and the fully redesigned Echo Show 16 has a 16-inch screen and Fire TV built in ($500). All of it runs on Alexa+, which comes with Prime.

Amazon clearly thinks an AI assistant needs more than a speaker in the kitchen, it wants eyes and ears in every room. A frame that picks your best moments for you sounds sweet right up until you remember who is doing the analyzing.