Amazon Introduces New Faster Fire TV Cube

It was on Wednesday that e-commerce giant Amazon revealed a new and faster Fire TV Cube and expanded its streaming TV lineup.

Amazon announced over 15 products from third-partner partners that are incorporating Alexa and Fire TV into its products.

The newest version of the Fire TV Cube is up to two times faster than last year’s model but like its predecessor, the new model lets you control your TV, cable box and other inputs using just your voice.

“The design is the same because it’s worked well in terms of microphone array and layout,” Amazon’s vice president of product development for Fire TV Sandeep Gupta told CNBC. “Local voice control has a subset of commands that are critical and cut out the cloud part so if we recognize [a command] it can just execute it immediately,” he added.

Gupta told CNBC that Amazon has found Fire TV Cube owners are more likely to interact using voice than other Fire TV product owners.

“We get eight times the usage of voice than we do in other devices,” explained Gupta. “We see almost 80% of Fire TV Cube users using it for device automation and smart home devices,” he said.

The new Fire TV Cube costs $119.99 in the U.S., which is the same price as the original model. Pre-orders open on Wednesday in the U.S.

Plus for the first time they will also happen in Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan. It will ship on Oct. 10 in the U.S., United Kingdom and Germany and on Nov. 5 in Japan.

Disclaimer: We have no position in Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN) and have not been compensated for this article.