Amazon announces 5.5-inch Echo Show 5 that's shipping in July for $89.99, launches new Alexa commands to delete what you just said or everything you said today
A direct challenge to the Google Nest Home Hub — Amazon is releasing a new Echo device today because apparently …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Echo Show line is shrinking and cheapening fast: what began in 2017 as a $229.99, 7-inch video-calling speaker (the original Echo Show) becomes today a 5.5-inch bedside-oriented display at $89.99, explicitly framed against the Google Nest Home Hub.
The second half of the announcement matters just as much: new Alexa voice commands let users delete the last thing they said or everything said today — Amazon building deletion into the wake-word experience rather than burying it in settings.
First-order effects
- Buyers get an Echo-branded smart display at under $100 for the first time in the line's history, putting Amazon head-to-head with the Google Nest Home Hub at an impulse-purchase price point.
- Alexa users gain immediate, on-device control over their voice history through spoken commands, without opening an app or dashboard.
Second-order effects
- Google faces pressure to match both halves of the pitch — sub-$100 pricing and frictionless voice-deletion controls — on the Nest Home Hub, since privacy handling is now a visible differentiator rather than a back-end policy.
- Amazon's own review coverage later flags that the Show 5 carries no support for Google services, sharpening the ecosystem split: each sub-$100 display deepens lock-in to its maker's assistant and services.
Third-order effects
- If voice-deletion commands become standard across assistants, always-listening hardware shifts from 'trust us' retention policies to user-facing data controls as a baseline feature, and regulators' questions about stored audio move from whether deletion exists to how easy it is.
- At these prices, smart displays stop being premium gadgets and become commodity entry points whose economics depend on services and commerce attached to the account, not the hardware margin.
The trend: Smart displays are racing down the price curve while privacy controls migrate from dashboards into spoken commands, turning data-handling ease into a competitive feature between Amazon and Google.