Consumer Technology Amazon Puts Alexa in Everything, including a Microwave

[TwinIon]

Amazon held an event yesterday and released a deluge of new Alexa enabled devices, many expected, some rather surprising.

Not surprising: New versions of the Echo Dot and Echo Plus (an Echo with smart home radios). More fabric, supposedly better speakers, pretty much exactly what you'd expect. They also released an updated Echo Show with a 10" screen that no longer looks like an engineering sample.

 

Amazon is also going after Sonos and Chromecast Audio by releasing products designed to plug into your existing speakers. There's the Echo Input, which is pretty much just the microphone array from a dot with bluetooth and audio connections, so you can turn any speaker into an Echo. They're also going after higher end audio by releasing the Echo Link, which is designed to plug into your existing home amplifier setup. They also put out the Echo Link Amp, which is the same thing with a 60W 2-channel amp. For some reason they also put out an Echo Sub, just in case you need to add some base to your otherwise poor sounding Echos.

 

 

They put out an Echo smart plug, which is exactly what it sounds like.

 

Then Amazon went a little bit overboard.

 

On one end you have the "silly, but still maybe a good idea" Echo Wall Clock.

It's a basic wall clock, but it connects to your Echo over bluetooth. It will automatically set the correct time, including for daylight savings, but the big pitch here is the ring of LEDs around the edge that will show a visual indication of the timers you set on your Echo. As someone that uses the Echo for cooking timers daily, this might be worth the $30.

 

Then Amazon put out a freaking microwave. It's a basic, $60 microwave that, like the clock, connects to an Echo over bluetooth, allow you to add time or start a preset. I hardly use our microwave, but it's hard to imagine this being very useful to anyone.

 

 

Just in case having Alexa everywhere in your house, talking to all your appliances isn't quite enough, they also put out an Echo for your car.

It pairs to your phone and your car speakers, so you can ask for directions, start a call, or do any other Alexa commands. It seems to me that the only thing that this will do that your phone won't do with its native voice assistant is connect to your smart home. I suppose having a better mic is something, but still it seems pretty questionably worthwhile.

 

The last thing that I think is actually kind of cool is the Fire TV Recast. It's basically a hard drive with an OTA tuner that you plug into your network and an antenna to get a DVR for OTA TV. It doesn't plug into your TV. You'll need a Fire TV that this box will stream to. It's probably not going to be the best OTA DVR you can get, but it might be a really good, simple solution for many.

[RedSoxFan9]

I’m interested in the echo auto.  It would be nice to have a voice assistant that actually can hear you and do the right thing

[EternallDarkness]

big brother watching/listening always!

[Wild]

On 9/21/2018 at 4:22 PM, EternallDarkness said:

big brother watching/listening always!

 

The thing is, we can have this and privacy. The audio has to be processed server side because of the low-powered devices which is why the devices are connected, and they do skim aggregate data off the top for testing and tracking, but they don't need to do the latter part. Most of this data is dumped because it's not worth storing. I worked on a project that uses voice recognition from one of the big three, and it wasn't something we needed or wanted to keep.

 

We can create smart laws that prevent micro level data tracking and still allows these devices to work just fine, with opt-in requirements for data storing that are hard capped at 15% of the userbase being asked. That allows the companies to get the quantitative data they need to make improvements while preventing them from making "opt in" essentially a mandatory requirement by locking out features.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

"Alexa: cook my burrito"

[TheLeon]

I really don't understand the microwave. If you need to add time or adjust something on that, aren't you standing right there looking at it? You can't tell from the other room that your Lean Cuisine needs another minute. 

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

Maybe next they'll do a line of Alexa powered fleshlights and vibrators.