Alexa is Now Even Smarter-New Features Help Make Everyday Life More Convenient, Safe, and Entertaining Alexa now knows how to do millions of things, including new capabilities across Routines, Music, Smart Home, Home Monitoring, Alexa Calling, Amazon FreeTime on Alexa and more
All new Alexa features begin rolling out to select new and existing Echo devices in the coming months
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sep. 20, 2018-- (NASDAQ: AMZN)-Alongside a new lineup of Echo devices, Amazon today introduced new Alexa features that help make life even more convenient, safe, and entertaining. New capabilities include entertainment features like left-right stereo pairing, TIDAL, and Amazon Music New Release Notifications; productivity features like email management, step-by-step cooking, and location-based Routines; smart home and home monitoring features like Alexa Guard, Hunches, and Local Voice Control; and FreeTime on Alexa features like kid-focused Routines, podcasts, new skills, and more.
The Alexa service is always getting smarter, whether you're using the Echo you bought three years ago or an Echo Show you buy tomorrow. We have thousands of engineers and scientists inventing on behalf of customers, and today we're excited to introduce even more features to help make customers' lives simpler, safer, and more convenient, said Tom Taylor, Senior Vice President, Amazon Alexa. Soon customers will be able to manage their email, easily secure their home, watch the shows they love on Echo Show, and make their daily routines more productive-all just by asking Alexa.
Over the past year we've made incredible scientific advances in Alexa's Artificial Intelligence (A.I.). We have applied deep neural networks to advance Alexas ability to detect challenging acoustic phenomena such as whispered speech and anomalous events like glass breaking; made breakthroughs in combining transfer learning and deep learning to teach Alexa new languages and capabilities faster; improved contextual understanding and added memory to help customers discover skills and ask follow-up questions more naturally; and used active learning and unsupervised learning to improve foundational wake word detection, speech recognition, and natural language understanding, said Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist, Amazon Alexa. We've only scratched the surface of A.I.-powered inventions and we'll continue to invent ways to make Alexa more useful for our customers.
Make Your Home Smarter and Safer
Alexa Guard
Alexa can help keep your home safe when you're away with Alexa Guard-just say, Alexa, I'm leaving to activate Guard. When you enable Guard, Alexa can send you Smart Alerts about the sound of glass-breaking, smoke detectors, or carbon monoxide alarms detected in your home. Alexa can also intuitively turn lights on and off to help deter intruders using Away Lighting and can integrate with alarm systems from Ring and ADT to keep your home safe. This feature will be available on select Echo devices later this year.
Hunches
As you interact with your smart home, Alexa learns more about your day-to-day usage and can sense when connected smart devices such as lights, locks, switches, and plugs are not in the state that you prefer. For example, if your living room light is on when you say Alexa, good night, Alexa will respond with Good night. By the way, your living room light is on. Do you want me to turn it off? This feature will be available later this year.
Frustration Free Setup
We want to remove the frustration of connecting new smart home devices to Wi-Fi by making it as simple as plugging them in. As a first step toward realizing this vision, we're rolling out Wi-Fi simple setup so customers can connect smart devices to their Wi-Fi network and Alexa by simply using their voice or scanning a barcode on the back of their smart device using the Alexa app. Wi-Fi simple setup is initially available with new Echo devices, the new Amazon Smart Plug, and AmazonBasics Microwave. Additional devices will be added in the future.
Local Voice Control
When there's an internet outage, or if you're in an area with unreliable internet connection, Local Voice Control allows you to still use your voice to control lights, plugs, and switches that are connected to an Echo device with a built-in smart home hub, such as the all-new Echo Plus or all-new Echo Show.
Video Doorbell
In the coming weeks, Echo Show devices will have a 2-way talk feature that works with Ring and August doorbell cameras. When the doorbell rings or motion is detected by the security camera, just say Alexa, answer the front door to see and talk to whoever is there without having to open the door. Additionally, Alexa will be able to play a chime and make an announcement when someone rings your Ring and August doorbell cameras. You can also use Alexa Routines to play custom announcements when the front door camera detects movement or someone rings the doorbell.
Alexa Makes Your Life More Convenient
New Alexa Routines
Customize your daily routine more than ever before through adding location-based Alexa Routines that trigger when you leave or arrive at home or work. Plus add timed delays in between Alexa Routine actions; add time-limited music-great for white noise or sleep sounds; and add temperature and motion based Alexa Routines that trigger when the temperature in a room is too high or too low, or when motion is detected.
Location-Based Reminders
You can set reminders to trigger when you leave or arrive at home or work. Simply say, Alexa, remind me to take the chicken out when I get home, and when you arrive, Alexa will automatically speak the reminder and send a notification to your phone.
Cook with Alexa
Cooking with Alexa makes Echo devices even more useful in the kitc
