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Use Alexa to ask Martian's watches all your burning questions
Have one of Martian's voice-powered smartwatches? Cool, because now mVoice models and certain Guess timepieces will work with Amazon's Alexa technology. "We're excited to work with Martian Watches to bring Alexa to mVoice timepieces so customers can easily perform everyday tasks -- like controlling their smart home with ecobee, requesting a ride with Lyft or checking the daily news -- using just their voice," Amazon's director of voice services Aaron Brown said in a statement. Just think, now you can use Alexa on your watch (or via the mVoice app), to order another voice-controlled watch, just by asking. The future is a wild place, y'all.
Control Neato's robot vacuum with Amazon Alexa voice commands
Getting your robotic vacuum to clean the house is usually a matter of setting a timer or pressing a start button -- but what if you could just ask it to get to work? If you happen to own an Amazon Echo and a Neato Botvac Connected robot vacuum, now you can. Today the company announced that its Wifi-connected vacuum cleaner will take commands from Amazon Alexa. The feature is extremely straightforward, and features just two commands: start and stop.
Personal assistants are ushering in the age of AI at home
Google Home is the latest embodiment of a virtual assistant. The voice-activated speaker can help you make a dinner reservation, remind you to catch your flight, fire up your favorite playlist and even translate words for you on the fly. While the voice interface is expected to make quotidian tasks easier, it also gives the company unprecedented access to human patterns and preferences that are crucial to the next phase of artificial intelligence. Comparing an AI agent to a personal assistant, as most companies have been doing of late, makes for a powerful metaphor. It is one that is indicative of the human capabilities that most major technology companies want their disembodied helpers to adopt. Over the last couple of years, with improvements in speech-recognition technology, Siri, Cortana and Google Now have slowly learned to move beyond the basics of weather updates to take on more complex responsibilities like managing your calendar or answering your queries. But products that invade our personal spaces -- like Amazon's Echo and Google Home -- point to a larger shift in human-device interaction that is currently underway.
Take Amazon's Alexa for a spin in your browser
Alexa's gradual procession toward ubiquity is proof that the Echo speaker isn't the heart of Amazon's voice assistant, it's the server farms that run it. Now you can tap into Alexa with the device sitting on your desk or lap thanks to Echosim.io, a website that replicates the experience of talking to Jeff Bezos' smart speakers. Sign in with your Amazon info, give the website permission to access your microphone and you're good to go.
Amazon Echo can tell you movie times and NFL scores
Amazon keeps making its Echo speaker better and better. The device, powered by the retailer's Alexa voice recognition technology, is now getting an update that allows it to give more info about movies, like which are playing at theaters near you and when, as well as other practical details. Your only job is to say audio commands such as "Alexa, what action movies are playing Friday night?" or "Alexa, tell me more about Star Wars: The Force Awakens."
Amazon is offering Echo voice tech to other manufacturers
Now that Amazon's voice-controlled Echo speaker is available to everyone, the company is hinting at third-party devices that will make use of the same voice tech that powers the Echo's built-in assistant, "Alexa." Additionally, Amazon is giving developers access to the Alexa Skills Kit, a free SDK that will make it easy for them to create new features for the Echo platform. Lastly, the company launched the Alexa Fund, a $100 million endowment designed to support developers, manufacturers and startups who are interested in making voice-powered products for its ecosystem. To be a part of it, Amazon says it's going to base those decisions on the technology's ability to influence the Alexa Skills Kit or the Alexa Voice Service. What this tells us, though, is that Amazon is getting serious about what appeared to be a simple side-project from the beginning.
