Amazon’s Alexa is the talk of CES 2017, as gadget makers rush out voice-activated machines for the smart home
Is voice activation the missing link that could at last make the concept of smart homes a success? Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant and Echo smart speaker have stolen a march in the race to deliver hands-free living
“Alexa, is Amazon invading our homes?” The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week has seen dozens of gadgets announced that can be controlled using voice commands via Amazon’s Alexa personal assistant, from table lamps and home stereos to domestic robots and even the wider IoT (internet of things).
Alexa is a virtual personal assistant that’s been available for about two years. Like Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google Assistant, you can ask it the weather, set alarms, read the news, and perform various tasks including controlling some smart devices around the home.
For now Alexa is monolingual and speaks only English, but a German version has recently been announced, with other “international” languages, including Chinese, scheduled to follow.
Not surprisingly, Alexa can also order things from the Amazon store, but the real difference between Alexa and the rest is in its rapidly increasing popularity. Cue an orgy of Alexa-enabled gadgets at the CES.
Although Alexa itself “lives” in the cloud, Amazon’s masterstroke was first to create the Amazon Echo, a hands-free smart speaker controlled with voice alone, and then more recently to issue the Amazon Echo Dot, a smaller and much more affordable version. By taking away the need to unlock a phone and open an app to control other gadgets, using voice as a control mechanism could prove to be the missing link in popularising the smart home.