 Hey everyone, it's Lauren Good with The Verge and you are taking a look at the successor to last year's Amazon Echo speaker. This is the new Amazon Tap. The first thing you'll notice about it is that it is smaller than the original Amazon Echo speaker and it's portable. One of the biggest differences aside from its portability is the fact that you have to actually tap it in order to queue up Alexa, the virtual assistant that lives inside the speaker. In the original one you could be across the room or in some cases even in a different room and just shout out Alexa. In this case there's just this directional microphone at the top here and you actually have to tap it and say Alexa and it works that way. I pronounce Alexa, Alexa. The stress is on the middle syllable. Oh, okay, so I mispronounced her name apparently. You can also see that there are these physical controls at the top. If you feel them they're raised ever so slightly so it's not entirely smooth but that's so you can control your music. You can either press those buttons or if you're playing music on your phone via Bluetooth you can control your music that way. In terms of battery life Amazon says you'll get about nine hours of active use and three weeks in standby mode. The tap ships with this charging pod so this would be tethered and then when it needs to charge you just pop it on. So it is pretty cool the idea that you'd be able to take Alexa with you. Let's say you're taking it on a road trip, you could tether it to your phone, get Wi-Fi that way and have access to all the fun Alexa stuff. On the downside I guess you would have to get used to just pressing this in order to communicate with the speaker. So it is a different experience than you would get from the standalone Echo. Amazon's tap goes on sale today. It's going to cost $129.99. Prime users are not getting a deal this time around like they did on the original Echo and Amazon says it will shift by the end of the month.