The Amazon Tap

The Amazon Tap is the latest in Amazon’s line of voice-powered black boxes that order things on Amazon when you ask them to. Unlike the Echo, which is meant to sit in the corner of your room, with an active microphone, listening to you talk, the Tap is a portable device. The ad copy and imagery suggests you’ll take it to the beach, or (as the pictures show) careening through the city streets on a bike, hooked to your backpack. Now, if they could just combine voice recognition and streaming music with a telephone, an app store, and a mobile browser, they’d be onto something.