Yeah it's a clone of the trivial parts of the Echo, but not the difficult parts that are necessary to make it great, specifically: * Beamforming microphone array (this is a real clone: http://www.xmos.com/products/microphones ) * Wake-word / hot-word detection ("Ok Google", "Alexa", etc.) * Intent recognition / NLU
I thought that "beamforming" only applied to actively emitting signals, so that the waveforms would cancel/reinforce each other, to get the desired "direction". I have no idea how that works for microphones. Google is not very helpful, I get lots of hits for products.
A much more intuitive name for beamforming is spatial filtering [1]. It just means using mutiple receivers along with knowledge about their location to filter out noise and other signals you don't want. The term also applies to emitters like phased radar arrays or MIMO cell towers which can use spatial filtering for beamforming but it's a general technique.