【family Archives】

Amazon's Echo speakers are family Archivesabout to get a lot more useful.

The company just introduced an update that allows people to play music over multiple Echos at once, making Amazon's speakers much more practical for home audio.

Now, you can use the Alexa app to create "groups" of Echo devices that you want to sync up. Then, once you have your group of speakers, all you have to do is ask Alexa to play music from that synced group.

The feature will be particularly useful for people who use the Echo Dot with third-party speakers as they can now sync those up with other Alexa-enabled speakers. It works with Amazon Music, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Pandora for now, and the company says support for Spotify and SiriusXM is "coming soon."

The update also makes the Echo a little more competitive with Google's Home speaker, which already lets you sync up audio across multiple Google Home speakers and Chromecast Audio devices.

The company also unveiled two new developer tools that will improve multi-room audio for people who use multiple speakers at once. A new Connected Speaker API, which is going into developer preview as of Tuesday, lets companies like Bose, Sonos, and Samsung build Alexa capabilities into their speakers.

FInally, a Multi-Room Music SDK that will lets people sync up third-party Alexa-enabled speakers with their Echo speakers. Amazon says those features will be available later this year.

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