Alexa is Now Even Smarter-New Features Help Make Everyday Life More Convenient, Safe, and Entertaining
20/09/2018
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
LINK: | http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=176060&p=irol-newsArticle&... |
See more stories from phx |
Most recent headlines
04/08/2024
Dalet Appoints Santiago Solanas as CEO to Lead Next Era of Growth and Innovation
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, is excited to announce Santiago Solanas as its new Chief Executive Officer (CEO)....
03/06/2024
Dalet and Veritone Reach Agreement to Distribute, Transact and Monetize Media Archives
Dalet, a leading technology and service provider for media-rich organizations, a...
28/04/2024
Mediahaus delivers the first SRT live-streaming sports production over 5G with URSA Broadcast G2
Mediahaus delivers the first SRT live-streaming sports production over 5G with U...
27/04/2024
L3Harris Chair and CEO Christopher E. Kubasik Discusses 1Q24 On CNBC's "Closing Bell: Overtime"
On April 26, L3Harris Chair and CEO Christopher E. Kubasik joined CNBC's Mor...
27/04/2024
Audinate Adds Major New Features to Dante Connect
PORTLAND, Oregon Audinate Group Limited, the developer of the Dante AV-over-IP solution, announced significant new additions to Dante Connect, its cloud-based D...
27/04/2024
Bell Media Launches New Portfolio of FAST Channels
TORONTO Bell Media has launched 10 English and French-language FAST channels featuring entertainment, factual, news, and sports programming. The new free stream...
27/04/2024
Study: Broadcast TV Evening News Avoids Serious Economic Issues
An extensive new analysis of the news segments in the broadcast evening news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS has found that broadcasters devoted most of their...
27/04/2024
Hughes Opens Manufacturing Facility and Private 5G Incubation Center in Maryland
GERMANTOWN, Md. EchoStar's Hughes Network Systems has opened a new manufacturing facility and private 5G incubation center in Germantown, Maryland....
27/04/2024
Broadcasting Legend Harry Pappas Dead At 78
Harry Pappas, one of three brothers who founded Pappas Telecasting Companies in 1971, died April 24. He was 78 years old....
27/04/2024
Televisa Selects Synamedia For Broadcast Distribution Overhaul
ATLANTA and LONDON Mexican telecommunications and broadcast company Televisa has selected Synamedia for an overhaul of its broadcast distribution....
27/04/2024
Participate in the Survey - The Impact of AI on Media and the Creative Industry
Participate in the Survey - The Impact of AI on Media and the Creative Industry Pascal Wagner April 26, 2024 0 Comments By participating in this surve...
27/04/2024
SDVI Rally Access Workstation Earns Two Top Awards at 2024 NAB Show
SDVI Rally Access Workstation Earns Two Top Awards at 2024 NAB Show Brie Clayton April 26, 2024 0 Comments SDVI, the leading platform provider for clo...
27/04/2024
Berklee's Music and Health Institute Launches Community Health Musician Certificate
Berklee's Music and Health Institute Launches Community Health Musician Cert...
27/04/2024
Charter Reports Higher Q1 Profits Despite Broadband, Video Losses
Charter Communications reported higher first-quarter profits despite continued cord-cutting and competition for broadband customers....
27/04/2024
Environmental Groups Aim To Make Unscripted TV More Sustainable
Two environmentally-focused groups are partnering to engage the unscripted TV world in finding better ways to address climate change. Reality of Change is an ec...
27/04/2024
Sarah Garcia Named Weekend Anchor at Telemundo 40 in Texas
Sarah Garcia has been promoted to weekend anchor at KTLM McAllen, Texas, known as Telemundo 40. Starting April 27, she will anchor Noticias Telemundo 40 weekend...
27/04/2024
CBS Sports Kicks Off FAST Channel for UEFA Champions League on Pluto TV
CBS Sports said it launched a new 24-hour free, ad supported streaming television (FAST) channel devoted to the UEFA Champions League....
27/04/2024
Brian Roberts's Pay Rose To $35 Million at Comcast
Comcast chairman and CEO Brian Roberts received $35.4 million in compensation in 2023, up 11% from the previous year, according to a proxy statement filed by th...
27/04/2024
John Lithgow Goes Back to School in Art Happens Here'
Art Happens Here With John Lithgow, which sees the actor study dance, ceramics, silk-screen printing and vocal jazz with students in Los Angeles, debuts on PBS ...
27/04/2024
FETV Wants Upfront Buyers Seeking Cable Viewers To Join Its Family
Remember Leave It to Beaver? Bewitched? Dragnet? When cable ratings were rising?...
27/04/2024
Catchy Comedy Features Gomer Pyle, USMC' Weekend Marathon
Next up for the weekend binge at Catchy Comedy is Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. Every weekend, Catchy Comedy features The Catchy Binge, a marathon of a classic sitcom....
26/04/2024
Sundance Film Festival CDMX 2024 kicks off today at Cinpolis
Sundance Film Festival CDMX 2024 kicks-off today with screenings in 5 theaters in Mexico City and the opening-night film, FRIDA, directed by Carla Guti rrez...
26/04/2024
Interview: Lourdes Portillo, Director of Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo, La Ofrenda
[Editor's Note: This interview is part of a larger feature about the women d...
26/04/2024
Career insights instead of everyday school life
Once again this year, SGL Carbon opened its doors to interested children and young people. On the occasion of the German Girls and Boys Day, which took place on...
26/04/2024
L3Harris Technologies Reports Strong First Quarter 2024 Results, Increases 2024 Profitability Guidance
Orders1 of $5.5 billion; book-to-bill of 1.06x Revenue of $5.2 billion, up 17%,...
26/04/2024
What Makes A Network Resilient?
Five Considerations For Communications Modernization In The 21st Century In the digital-enabled battlespace, the Joint Force needs to shoot, move and communica...
26/04/2024
CBS Sports Launches New Free Streaming Channel
CBS Sports has launched Champions League as a new, 24-hour streaming channel that will serve as the year-round destination for nonstop highlights of the UEFA ...
26/04/2024
Roku Streaming Homes Hit 81.6M
Despite tough competition in the streaming space, Roku reported solid results in Q1 2024, beating revenue expectations, with total net revenue up 19% YoY to $88...
26/04/2024
Sarah Farrell Named General Manager Of Pinewood Toronto Studios
LONDON AND TORONTO Pinewood Toronto Studios has appointed Sarah Farrell as general manager of the Studios in downtown Toronto....
26/04/2024
Quantum to Offer Advanced Filesharing Technology and Performance in StorNext and Myriad Solutions
Quantum to Offer Advanced Filesharing Technology and Performance in StorNext and...
26/04/2024
FilmLight Colour Awards welcomes 2024 entries and introduces new Emerging Talent' award
FilmLight Colour Awards welcomes 2024 entries and introduces new Emerging Talen...
26/04/2024
Picture Shop Announces Chris Evans as Head of Unscripted
Picture Shop Announces Chris Evans as Head of Unscripted Brie Clayton April 26, 2024 0 Comments Picture Shop announced Chris Evans will lead Unscripte...
26/04/2024
Participate in a Survey - The Impact of AI on Media and the Creative Industry
Participate in a Survey - The Impact of AI on Media and the Creative Industry Pascal Wagner April 26, 2024 0 Comments By participating in this survey,...
26/04/2024
Hi Barbie! Mattel Launching First FAST Channels on Samsung TV Plus
Toy maker Mattel said it is working with Samsung to launch its first free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels later this year....
26/04/2024
Marty Moe Named President Of Trusted Media Brands
Trusted Media Brands (TMB) said it named Marty Moe as president....
26/04/2024
Ron Howard Directs Jim Henson Documentary for Disney Plus
Ron Howard is the director on Jim Henson Idea Man, a documentary that premieres on Disney Plus May 31. Henson of course created Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Big...
26/04/2024
Kraken Skate Away From RSN Root Sports for Deals With Tegna, Amazon
The ice continues to melt under the regional sports network business as the Seattle Kraken of the National Hockey League have made a long-term deal to broadcast...
26/04/2024
Warner Bros. Discovery Launches Olli First-Party Data Platform
Heading into the upfronts, Warner Bros. Discovery said it launched Olli, a first-party data platform advertiser can use for converged, targeted advertising camp...
26/04/2024
The Equalizer' Gets Season 5 on CBS
CBS has renewed the drama The Equalizer, which will see season five on in 2024-2025. Queen Latifah stars....
26/04/2024
The CW Inks New Deal for Miss USA, Miss Teen USA
The CW has entered into an exclusive multiyear broadcast partnership for the Miss USA Pageant and the Miss Teen USA Pageant. The 73rd Miss USA Pageant will air ...
26/04/2024
Fuse Urging Young Viewers To Vote With Blunt Campaign
Fuse Media isn't mincing words in a campaign urging its young viewers to register and participate in the 2024 elections....
26/04/2024
Neil Gaiman's Sandman' Universe Expands With Dead Boy Detectives'
Dead Boy Detectives, a series from Neil Gaiman about a detective agency staffed by ghosts, debuts on Netflix April 25. George Rexstrew and Jayden Revri are in t...
26/04/2024
The Story Collective opens largest film and TV studio in the heart of London
The Story Collective has gradually repurposed the former Mortlake Brewery to include production offices, workshops and sound stages By Matthew Corrigan Publi...
26/04/2024
Richard Perkett joins Amagi as chief product officer
Perkett joins the company following a 25 year career in product management, product marketing, engineering and user experience (UX) across multiple industries ...
26/04/2024
Teradek Announces Smaller More Robust Built-in Antennas f...
Teradek, the industry leader in wireless video transmitters and receivers, announced today the launch of new Bolt 6 LT 750 and Bolt 6 Monitor Module 750 RX with...
26/04/2024
Amagi Names Richard Perkett Chief Product Officer
NEW YORK Amagi has appointed Richard Perkett chief product officer (CPO)....
26/04/2024
NAB Board Election Results Announced
WASHINGTON, D.C. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) has announced the results of the 2024 NAB Radio and Television Board of Directors elections. The...
26/04/2024
Mattel to Launch First FAST Channels on Samsung TV Plus
EL SEGUNDO, Calif. & NEW YORK Mattel has announced a deal to launch its first three 24/7 free ad supported streaming (FAST) channels on Samsung TV Plus, Samsung...
26/04/2024
NextGen TV Launches In Portland, Maine
PORTLAND, Maine Viewers here can now receive the NextGen TV signals of five local stations with the launch of ATSC 3.0 service from host station WPFO, which is ...