Amazon Updates Echo Hub With More Screen Customization for Smart Homes


Amazon has unveiled new changes coming to its all-purpose wall-mounted display, the 8-inch Echo Hub ($180). The Hub, focused on smart home control, now has new graphics and significantly deeper customization, Amazon announced Thursday. 

During normal operation, the Echo Hub usually shows controls for the devices you use the most, including those that use Matter, Zigbee, Thread and Bluetooth connections (as long as they work with Alexa). But you can also move these tiles around, enlarge or shrink them, and you can choose specific devices to add to the home screen for easier access.

A representative from Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. 

While devices are now grouped automatically by room and function, you can manually create your own groups to add a series of controls to. That includes routines that you may have previously set up.

Another innovation adds more granular controls, which is more useful than it may sound. For example, you can now access supported smart light bulbs, allowing you to dim them from 1% to 100% and to choose specific colors.

An Echo Hub on a red wall showing a security camera view of a driveway.

Echo Hubs can now give in-depth video information and answers with Alexa Plus and Ring AI.

Amazon

If you use Alexa Plus (free with Amazon Prime or $20 per month) and have a Ring AI subscription for Ring security cameras, the Echo Hub can also provide a summary of camera events and video clips of the relevant actions (for example, delivered packages) for up to four feeds at the same time. You can also search through existing security videos directly on the Hub with Alexa voice commands.

These sound like convenient changes for the Echo Hub, but I’d look forward to them coming to Echo Show devices like mine, too. Echo Shows have traditionally had a broader focus than smart home controls, like showing video calls or TV shows, but this new customizable screen sounds better than the news and ads my Show has instead. Hopefully, Amazon will push similar features to other Echo devices.





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Barbra Streisand is set to be honored at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, but she will no longer be attending the ceremony.

The 84-year-old icon will sadly not be there to accept her honorary Palme d’Or at the closing ceremony of the film festival due to a knee injury.

“On the advice of my doctors, as I continue recovering from a knee injury, I am sadly unable to attend the Festival de Cannes this year,” she shared in a statement, via Variety.

“But I am deeply honored to receive the honorary Palme d’Or and had so been looking forward to celebrating the remarkable films of the 79th edition.”

“I was also very much looking forward to spending time with colleagues whom I so admire — and, of course, returning to France, a place I have always loved. While I regret that I can’t be there in person, I want to extend my warmest congratulations to all of the filmmakers from around the world whose extraordinary talent and creative vision are being celebrated this year,” the statement continues.

“My heartfelt thanks to the Festival, and to everyone who continues to support and champion the art of cinema.”

The tribute will still happen on May 23.

Iris Knobloch, Thierry Frémaux and the entire festival team send Barbra Streisand their warmest wishes for a prompt recovery,” the festival said in a press release.

Barbra will be the third person to get an honorary Palme d’Or in 2026, including Peter Jackson and John Travolta.

If you missed it, Jane Fonda recently questioned why Barbra got to do Robert Redford‘s In Memoriam tribute at the 2026 Oscars, when she worked with him more often.

The post Why Barbra Streisand Is Skipping Her Cannes Film Festival 2026 Honorary Ceremony appeared first on Just Jared – Celebrity News and Gossip | Entertainment.



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