The science behind Echo Frames

How the team behind Echo Frames delivered longer battery life and improved sound quality inside the slim form factor of a pair of eyeglasses.

When the team behind Amazon’s Echo Frames set out to improve the next generation of their product, they needed to strike a delicate balance. Customer feedback on earlier versions of the smart audio eyeglasses centered on three elements: longer battery life, more style options, and improved sound quality.

A man with a beard is seen wearing a pair of Echo Frames glasses. He is standing outside and is pictured in three-quarters view.
Echo Frames feature custom-built speech processing technology that drastically improves word recognition — key for interacting with Alexa in windy or noisy environments.

Achieving all three of those goals would be a challenge in itself; doing that inside the slim form factor of a pair of Alexa-enabled eyeglasses upped the ante.

“All three of those goals are in tension with one another,” says Adam Slaboski, senior manager of product management and product lead for Echo Frames. The easiest way to improve battery and audio would be to increase the size of the device, but that would conflict with feedback around the importance of design. Amping up bass to improve the audio experience would consume more battery, and so on.

Finding that sweet spot was a huge effort in engineering and customer understanding.
Adam Slaboski

“Finding that sweet spot was a huge effort in engineering and customer understanding," Slaboski says.

With Echo Frames (3rd Gen) and Carrera Smart Glasses with Alexa (designed in collaboration with Safilo, one of the world’s leading eyewear companies), the Smart Eyewear team met the challenge.

The smart glasses feature enhanced audio playback, with custom-built speech-processing technology that dramatically improves word recognition — key for interacting with Alexa in windy or noisy environments. The new range of frame styles come in a variety of sizes, and all come with a significant boost in battery life.

From the outside, Echo Frames still look like a pair of regular eyeglasses. “But we changed everything on the inside,” says Jean Wang, general manager and director of Smart Eyewear. “And we learned new lessons along the way.”

Here’s how Amazon engineers and product designers tackled all three customer demands.

Turning up the volume with open-ear audio

Like previous generations of Echo Frames, the current model uses open-ear audio. In addition to fitting the form factor of a pair of glasses, this allows users to maintain awareness of their surroundings while interacting with Alexa or enjoying audio entertainment.

Related content
Combining psychoacoustics, signal processing, and speaker beamforming enhances stereo audio and delivers an immersive sound experience for customers.

The open-ear audio design has been popular with users who are blind or have low vision, notes Jenai Akina, senior product manager for Echo Frames. “It’s really beneficial that it doesn’t obstruct a critical sense like hearing,” she explains. “That form factor is really helpful for daily interactions — especially when we want to be open to engage with our environment and the people around us. Open ear allows customers to maintain awareness, while providing access to a voice assistant.”

Open-ear audio brings a host of unique challenges to the engineering process. Typical headphones and earbuds block off the ear from the outside world, preventing air from escaping. That funnels more of the sound waves from the speakers into the user’s ears. With an open-ear design, sound has to travel farther, and there is less control over direction. That could lower the audio volume and reduce clarity — and importantly, audio could leak out to people standing nearby. The key is to drive the sound pressure as much as possible toward the user’s ears while minimizing the audio leakage.

By bringing people into the lab, we can simulate real environmental noise conditions like wind, background noise in a crowded restaurant, and the sound of cars on the road.
Scott Choi

In working to improve audio quality, the team continued to hone the directionality of the sound while also working to improve volume and bass. A technique called dipole speaker configuration helps to do both. In addition to a sound porthole located near the ear canal, the frames feature a second porthole that cancels unnecessary sound while amping up bass.

With input from in-house audio experts and instruments to analyze measurements like harmonic distortion, the team came up with a set of potential tuning solutions that met objective targets for audio quality. They then tested those “flavors” of tuning in the lab with several user groups.

“By bringing people into the lab, we can simulate real environmental-noise conditions like wind, background noise in a crowded restaurant, and the sound of cars on the road,” explains senior manager of audio Scott Choi. That allowed his team to understand environmental variables in a controlled setting.

With the feedback from those focus groups, the team then selected a few of the most popular tunings to push out to beta testing, where users could provide feedback on a weekly basis.

“We see how the feedback trends change with each tuning change, which gradually allows it to mature and converge into a certain tuning,” Choi says. The result is audio calibrated to maximize intelligibility and volume without leaking private conversations (or guilty-pleasure playlists).

The Echo Frame team used a rotating arch of microphones to lest leakage. This animation shows the array moving in circles around a mannequin wearing the Gen 3 prototype, creating a 3D sphere plot of audio leakage. Via this testing, the team was able to minimize leakage to the side and back.
The Echo Frame team used a rotating arch of microphones to lest leakage. The array moved in circles around a mannequin wearing the Gen 3 prototype, creating a 3D sphere plot of audio leakage. Via this testing, the team was able to minimize leakage to the side and back.

To test leakage, the audio team rigged up a rotating arch of microphones. The array moved in circles around a mannequin wearing the Gen 3 prototype, creating a 3-D sphere plot of audio leakage. Choi explains that they focused on minimizing leakage to the side and back, and ultimately, the speakers were moved much closer to the ear to help minimize leakage and improve loudness.

Leakage isn’t the only privacy consideration. The Echo Frame team also continues to innovate on protecting users from bad actors who may get hold of their smart glasses.

Related content
Amazon senior principal engineer Luu Tran is helping the Alexa team innovate by collaborating closely with scientist colleagues.

Gen 2 protected users by requiring them to authenticate their sessions using a trusted phone. Without authentication, a user can’t invoke sensitive commands like “navigate me home,” unlocking a smart lock, or making a purchase. But customers didn’t like the added friction.

Now customers who enroll in Alexa Voice ID will be able to use their vocal fingerprints for authentication to receive responses to smart-home utterances.

“We’re the first on-the-go Alexa device to use Voice ID for privacy authentication,” Slaboski says.

Boosting battery life without cramping style

Gen 3 improves continuous music playback time to six hours, versus the four hours offered by the previous generation of Echo Frames. It also bumps battery life to up to 14 hours of moderate usage spread across playback, talk time, notifications, and Alexa interactions.

Delivering the desired loudness, bass, and audio quality while optimizing for battery life was a careful balance.
Ravi Sanapala

The team couldn’t simply slap on a bigger battery without making the Echo Frames look less like normal glasses. And with sound quality high on the priority list as well, the devices were going to need as much juice as ever. The team focused on trimming power use in standby mode, ensuring that the overall battery consumption would go down without weakening the speakers when users needed them.

“Delivering the desired loudness, bass, and audio quality while optimizing for battery life was a careful balance,” says senior product manager Ravi Sanapala. “We need the battery to last throughout as much of the day as possible and for Alexa to be available whenever users need it.”

The architectural changes in speaker placement helped keep power needs low while improving audio. The team also tweaked the placement of the battery itself, distributing its capacity differently than in Gen 2. Sanapala adds that algorithmic changes were key in balancing idle-battery conservation and on-demand device usage.

“We had to collaborate with all of our cross-functional teams to optimize everything,” Sanapala says.

Gen 3 also features an all-new charging stand, which is designed for compatibility with all frame shapes and keeps lenses upright, protecting them from scratches while wirelessly charging.

Making smart eyewear look like eyewear

Making glasses that are suitable for everyday wear has always been a priority. “One of our goals has always been to develop technology that appears when you need it and disappears when you don’t,” says Wang.

Previous models of Echo Frames have come in a single, one-size-fits-all style.

A person is seen wearing Echo Frames sunglasses outside. The person carries a notebook and is looking down at it, and there are some buildings and blue sky in the background.
The Echo Frames team consulted with both internal and external eyewear designers to review common and popular styles of frames, and to survey potential customers about their preferences.

“That was a very intentional move,” Wang explains. “We wanted to start simply and learn from customer feedback.”

Gen 2’s flexible spring hinge and adjustable temple tips ensured that the single size fit many different faces. In fact, Wang says, while the goal was to fit around half of all potential users, they’ve found that 85 percent of the adult population can comfortably wear the Gen 2 design.

But with Gen 3, Wang says, the team needed to go beyond designing glasses that looked typical. Customers wanted glasses that looked stylish, too.

The team consulted with both internal and external eyewear designers to review common and popular styles of frames, as well as “edgier” designs, and to survey potential customers about their preferences. After testing options with beta customers, they settled on a variety of styles in various colors that cover a range of aesthetics. They also switched to an acetate material to match the feel of high-end eyewear.

Related content
How a team of designers, scientists, developers, and engineers worked together to create a truly unique device in Echo Show 10.

While each style will still come in a single size, the range of designs will accommodate even more faces than Gen 2, as the collection spans narrow, medium, and wide fits. Each style features adjustable temple tips constructed out of silicone around a lightweight titanium core for better fit. And despite the boost in battery life, the temples of Gen 3 frames have actually been slimmed down. Wang notes that competitive products often place large batteries behind a user’s ears. But presenting Echo Frames users with something that bulky and uncomfortable was never on the table.

“We were working with really heavy constraints,” Wang says. “So we have been very deliberate in making design choices in the service of our customer. That’s challenged us to be innovative and really push the limits of what’s possible in the architecture of our designs.”

Related content

US, WA, Seattle
Do you want to re-invent how millions of people consume video content on their TVs, Tablets and Alexa? We are building a free to watch streaming service called Fire TV Channels (https://techcrunch.com/2023/08/21/amazon-launches-fire-tv-channels-app-400-fast-channels/). Our goal is to provide customers with a delightful and personalized experience for consuming content across News, Sports, Cooking, Gaming, Entertainment, Lifestyle and more. You will work closely with engineering and product stakeholders to realize our ambitious product vision. You will get to work with Generative AI and other state of the art technologies to help build personalization and recommendation solutions from the ground up. You will be in the driver's seat to present customers with content they will love. Using Amazon’s large-scale computing resources, you will ask research questions about customer behavior, build state-of-the-art models to generate recommendations and run these models to enhance the customer experience. You will participate in the Amazon ML community and mentor Applied Scientists and Software Engineers with a strong interest in and knowledge of ML. Your work will directly benefit customers and you will measure the impact using scientific tools.
IN, HR, Gurugram
We're on a journey to build something new a green field project! Come join our team and build new discovery and shopping products that connect customers with their vehicle of choice. We're looking for a talented Senior Applied Scientist to join our team of product managers, designers, and engineers to design, and build innovative automotive-shopping experiences for our customers. This is a great opportunity for an experienced engineer to design and implement the technology for a new Amazon business. We are looking for a Applied Scientist to design, implement and deliver end-to-end solutions. We are seeking passionate, hands-on, experienced and seasoned Senior Applied Scientist who will be deep in code and algorithms; who are technically strong in building scalable computer vision machine learning systems across item understanding, pose estimation, class imbalanced classifiers, identification and segmentation.. You will drive ideas to products using paradigms such as deep learning, semi supervised learning and dynamic learning. As a Senior Applied Scientist, you will also help lead and mentor our team of applied scientists and engineers. You will take on complex customer problems, distill customer requirements, and then deliver solutions that either leverage existing academic and industrial research or utilize your own out-of-the-box but pragmatic thinking. In addition to coming up with novel solutions and prototypes, you will directly contribute to implementation while you lead. A successful candidate has excellent technical depth, scientific vision, project management skills, great communication skills, and a drive to achieve results in a unified team environment. You should enjoy the process of solving real-world problems that, quite frankly, haven’t been solved at scale anywhere before. Along the way, we guarantee you’ll get opportunities to be a bold disruptor, prolific innovator, and a reputed problem solver—someone who truly enables AI and robotics to significantly impact the lives of millions of consumers. Key job responsibilities Architect, design, and implement Machine Learning models for vision systems on robotic platforms Optimize, deploy, and support at scale ML models on the edge. Influence the team's strategy and contribute to long-term vision and roadmap. Work with stakeholders across , science, and operations teams to iterate on design and implementation. Maintain high standards by participating in reviews, designing for fault tolerance and operational excellence, and creating mechanisms for continuous improvement. Prototype and test concepts or features, both through simulation and emulators and with live robotic equipment Work directly with customers and partners to test prototypes and incorporate feedback Mentor other engineer team members. A day in the life - 6+ years of building machine learning models for retail application experience - PhD, or Master's degree and 6+ years of applied research experience - Experience programming in Java, C++, Python or related language - Experience with neural deep learning methods and machine learning - Demonstrated expertise in computer vision and machine learning techniques.
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-modal systems. You will support projects that work on technologies including multi-modal model alignment, moderation systems and evaluation. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will support the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). You are also expected to publish in top tier conferences. About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems. Specifically, we focus on model alignment with an aim to maintain safety while not denting utility, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, HR, Gurugram
Our customers have immense faith in our ability to deliver packages timely and as expected. A well planned network seamlessly scales to handle millions of package movements a day. It has monitoring mechanisms that detect failures before they even happen (such as predicting network congestion, operations breakdown), and perform proactive corrective actions. When failures do happen, it has inbuilt redundancies to mitigate impact (such as determine other routes or service providers that can handle the extra load), and avoids relying on single points of failure (service provider, node, or arc). Finally, it is cost optimal, so that customers can be passed the benefit from an efficiently set up network. Amazon Shipping is hiring Applied Scientists to help improve our ability to plan and execute package movements. As an Applied Scientist in Amazon Shipping, you will work on multiple challenging machine learning problems spread across a wide spectrum of business problems. You will build ML models to help our transportation cost auditing platforms effectively audit off-manifest (discrepancies between planned and actual shipping cost). You will build models to improve the quality of financial and planning data by accurately predicting ship cost at a package level. Your models will help forecast the packages required to be pick from shipper warehouses to reduce First Mile shipping cost. Using signals from within the transportation network (such as network load, and velocity of movements derived from package scan events) and outside (such as weather signals), you will build models that predict delivery delay for every package. These models will help improve buyer experience by triggering early corrective actions, and generating proactive customer notifications. Your role will require you to demonstrate Think Big and Invent and Simplify, by refining and translating Transportation domain-related business problems into one or more Machine Learning problems. You will use techniques from a wide array of machine learning paradigms, such as supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised and reinforcement learning. Your model choices will include, but not be limited to, linear/logistic models, tree based models, deep learning models, ensemble models, and Q-learning models. You will use techniques such as LIME and SHAP to make your models interpretable for your customers. You will employ a family of reusable modelling solutions to ensure that your ML solution scales across multiple regions (such as North America, Europe, Asia) and package movement types (such as small parcel movements and truck movements). You will partner with Applied Scientists and Research Scientists from other teams in US and India working on related business domains. Your models are expected to be of production quality, and will be directly used in production services. You will work as part of a diverse data science and engineering team comprising of other Applied Scientists, Software Development Engineers and Business Intelligence Engineers. You will participate in the Amazon ML community by authoring scientific papers and submitting them to Machine Learning conferences. You will mentor Applied Scientists and Software Development Engineers having a strong interest in ML. You will also be called upon to provide ML consultation outside your team for other problem statements. If you are excited by this charter, come join us!
US, MA, Boston
The Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team is looking for a passionate, talented, and inventive Senior Applied Scientist with a strong deep learning background, to build industry-leading technology with Large Language Models (LLMs) and multimodal systems. Key job responsibilities As a Senior Applied Scientist with the AGI team, you will work with talented peers to lead the development of novel algorithms and modeling techniques, to advance the state of the art with LLMs. Your work will directly impact our customers in the form of products and services that make use of speech and language technology. You will leverage Amazon’s heterogeneous data sources and large-scale computing resources to accelerate advances in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). About the team The AGI team has a mission to push the envelope in LLMs and multimodal systems, in order to provide the best-possible experience for our customers.
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field or relevant science experience (publications/scientific prototypes) in lieu of Masters - Experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute
IN, KA, Bengaluru
The Amazon Alexa AI team in India is seeking a talented, self-driven Applied Scientist to work on prototyping, optimizing, and deploying ML algorithms within the realm of Generative AI. Key responsibilities include: - Research, experiment and build Proof Of Concepts advancing the state of the art in AI & ML for GenAI. - Collaborate with cross-functional teams to architect and execute technically rigorous AI projects. - Thrive in dynamic environments, adapting quickly to evolving technical requirements and deadlines. - Engage in effective technical communication (written & spoken) with coordination across teams. - Conduct thorough documentation of algorithms, methodologies, and findings for transparency and reproducibility. - Publish research papers in internal and external venues of repute - Support on-call activities for critical issues Basic Qualifications: - Master’s or PhD in computer science, statistics or a related field - 2-7 years experience in deep learning, machine learning, and data science. - Proficiency in coding and software development, with a strong focus on machine learning frameworks. - Experience in Python, or another language; command line usage; familiarity with Linux and AWS ecosystems. - Understanding of relevant statistical measures such as confidence intervals, significance of error measurements, development and evaluation data sets, etc. - Excellent communication skills (written & spoken) and ability to collaborate effectively in a distributed, cross-functional team setting. - Papers published in AI/ML venues of repute Preferred Qualifications: - Track record of diving into data to discover hidden patterns and conducting error/deviation analysis - Ability to develop experimental and analytic plans for data modeling processes, use of strong baselines, ability to accurately determine cause and effect relations - The motivation to achieve results in a fast-paced environment. - Exceptional level of organization and strong attention to detail - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
IN, KA, Bengaluru
Amazon is investing heavily in building a world class advertising business and we are responsible for defining and delivering a collection of self-service performance advertising products that drive discovery and sales. Our products are strategically important to our Retail and Marketplace businesses driving long term growth. We deliver billions of ad impressions and millions of clicks daily and are breaking fresh ground to create world-class products. We are highly motivated, collaborative and fun-loving with an entrepreneurial spirit and bias for action. With a broad mandate to experiment and innovate, we are growing at an unprecedented rate with a seemingly endless range of new opportunities. The ATT team, based in Bangalore, is responsible for ensuring that ads are relevant and is of good quality, leading to higher conversion for the sellers and providing a great experience for the customers. We deal with one of the world’s largest product catalog, handle billions of requests a day with plans to grow it by order of magnitude and use automated systems to validate tens of millions of offers submitted by thousands of merchants in multiple countries and languages. In this role, you will build and develop ML models to address content understanding problems in Ads. These models will rely on a variety of visual and textual features requiring expertise in both domains. These models need to scale to multiple languages and countries. You will collaborate with engineers and other scientists to build, train and deploy these models. As part of these activities, you will develop production level code that enables moderation of millions of ads submitted each day.
US, WA, Seattle
The Search Supply & Experiences team, within Sponsored Products, is seeking an Applied Scientist to solve challenging problems in natural language understanding, personalization, and other areas using the latest techniques in machine learning. In our team, you will have the opportunity to create new ads experiences that elevate the shopping experience for our hundreds of millions customers worldwide. As an Applied Scientist, you will partner with other talented scientists and engineers to design, train, test, and deploy machine learning models. You will be responsible for translating business and engineering requirements into deliverables, and performing detailed experiment analysis to determine how shoppers and advertisers are responding to your changes. We are looking for candidates who thrive in an exciting, fast-paced environment and who have a strong personal interest in learning, researching, and creating new technologies with high customer impact. Key job responsibilities As an Applied Scientist on the Search Supply & Experiences team you will: - Perform hands-on analysis and modeling of enormous datasets to develop insights that increase traffic monetization and merchandise sales, without compromising the shopper experience. - Drive end-to-end machine learning projects that have a high degree of ambiguity, scale, and complexity. - Build machine learning models, perform proof-of-concept, experiment, optimize, and deploy your models into production; work closely with software engineers to assist in productionizing your ML models. - Design and run experiments, gather data, and perform statistical analysis. - Establish scalable, efficient, automated processes for large-scale data analysis, machine-learning model development, model validation and serving. - Stay up to date on the latest advances in machine learning. About the team We are a customer-obsessed team of engineers, technologists, product leaders, and scientists. We are focused on continuous exploration of contexts and creatives where advertising delivers value to shoppers and advertisers. We specifically work on new ads experiences globally with the goal of helping shoppers make the most informed purchase decision. We obsess about our customers and we are continuously innovating on their behalf to enrich their shopping experience on Amazon
US, WA, Seattle
Amazon.com strives to be Earth's most customer-centric company where customers can shop in our stores to find and discover anything they want to buy. We hire the world's brightest minds, offering them a fast paced, technologically sophisticated and friendly work environment. Economists at Amazon partner closely with senior management, business stakeholders, scientist and engineers, and economist leadership to solve key business problems ranging from Amazon Web Services, Kindle, Prime, inventory planning, international retail, third party merchants, search, pricing, labor and employment planning, effective benefits (health, retirement, etc.) and beyond. Amazon Economists build econometric models using our world class data systems and apply approaches from a variety of skillsets – applied macro/time series, applied micro, econometric theory, empirical IO, empirical health, labor, public economics and related fields are all highly valued skillsets at Amazon. You will work in a fast moving environment to solve business problems as a member of either a cross-functional team embedded within a business unit or a central science and economics organization. You will be expected to develop techniques that apply econometrics to large data sets, address quantitative problems, and contribute to the design of automated systems around the company. About the team The International Seller Services (ISS) Economics team is a dynamic group at the forefront of shaping Amazon's global seller ecosystem. As part of ISS, we drive innovation and growth through sophisticated economic analysis and data-driven insights. Our mission is critical: we're transforming how Amazon empowers millions of international sellers to succeed in the digital marketplace. Our team stands at the intersection of innovative technology and practical business solutions. We're leading Amazon's transformation in seller services through work with Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI, while tackling fundamental questions about seller growth, marketplace dynamics, and operational efficiency. What sets us apart is our unique blend of rigorous economic methodology and practical business impact. We're not just analyzing data – we're building the frameworks and measurement systems that will define the future of Amazon's seller services. Whether we're optimizing the seller journey, evaluating new technologies, or designing innovative service models, our team transforms complex economic challenges into actionable insights that drive real-world results. Join us in shaping how millions of businesses worldwide succeed on Amazon's marketplace, while working on problems that combine economic theory, advanced analytics, and innovative technology.