During a surprise event held at its Seattle, US headquarters, Amazon unveiled over a dozen new products that work with the personal assistant Alexa, which has been on the market for about four years. Some of the new features are quite creative, like a microwave that can connect to your home WiFi to receive instructions from Alexa on how to reheat and cook food. Amazon wants to make its personal assistant popular and widespread not only among technology enthusiasts, who adopted it almost immediately, but also among the less experienced, offering familiar products that they already know, such as a microwave or a wall clock. but with Alexa inside them.
Amazon's goal is to be everywhere with your personal assistant, so that each user can always ask Alexa for the latest news or weather information, activate some appliances in the house, make an appointment or turn off all the lights automatically before going. to sleep. But what Amazon really cares about is offering a tool that allows you to instantly buy something on its giant ecommerce site, without even having to visit it on your computer or smartphone. Four years ago Alexa was born with that purpose, which still remains at the heart of Amazon's strategy today.
Take for example the new microwave announced during the event on Thursday 20 September. Apparently it is a normal microwave, one of the cheap ones and without complicated programs to set for cooking. It doesn't have Alexa installed directly into it, but it does have the ability to communicate with a separate internet-connected device set to work with the voice assistant. You can then communicate to Alexa the quantity and type of food to have it automatically manage the oven to cook them. Amazon explained that the system is a prime example of how home appliances could change, and that it's a way to experiment and get other manufacturers to go this route, employing Alexa of course.
Amazon has always had an “experimental” sales approach with its products, which is rarely found in other large tech companies. Instead of presenting only one new product at a time, extremely refined in every detail as Apple does, Amazon shows the novelties it has worked on as soon as possible to check reactions directly with its customers. This strategy has contributed to some of Amazon's biggest successes, such as Kindle ebook readers and Echoes (speakers with Alexa), but also to some notable failures such as the Fire smartphone, abandoned after a few years due to very little interest from the users.
It is therefore difficult to predict whether all the objects presented will have a future. Among these, in addition to the microwave which costs about 60 dollars, there are an amplifier with Alexa to connect to the speakers of your stereo system, a subwoofer that can be connected to two Echos to have a wireless stereo at home, a wall clock that it can set different timers, a smart plug to turn any appliance on or off, a small and slim Echo to use on the car dashboard and a kind of video recorder, which records TV programs and can then stream them to their devices. Amazon has also revamped its Echo Dot and Echo Plus, significantly improving their design.
Amazon wants to hurry to beat the competition from Google and Apple, both of whom are interested in expanding their home improvement services. The string of novelties could give Amazon some advantages, but the fact that Alexa is available in a small number of countries for now remains a disadvantage. Google has caught up a lot over the past year with its Assistant, which not only works on hundreds of millions of Android smartphones, but also on Google Home devices. The Assistant has behind it the enormous amount of data of the largest search engine in the world, which is also investing heavily in new artificial intelligence solutions to further improve its performance. Apple is less threatening on this front for now: Siri isn't on a par with Alexa or the Google Assistant, and Apple HomePods continue to be too expensive for most users. In the presentation of the new iPhone XS, Apple has practically not mentioned Siri, demonstrating that there are still many things to fix to make the system competitive.
However, Amazon retains a certain advantage over Google over the things Alexa can already physically do. The company has long started a program to allow those who produce apps and appliances to “teach” Alexa new things (“skills”). The program has been greatly encouraged by Amazon in recent months, to the point that it has now produced more than 50 thousand different skills. Finding your way around so many features could be a problem for users: Amazon is aware of this and for this reason it is perfecting a function that leads Alexa to choose, from time to time, the most suitable skills to perform a certain task.
Analysts and observers, on the other hand, are more skeptical of Amazon's actual ability to develop artificial intelligence solutions for Alexa than competitors like Google. The company is also investing heavily on this front and has announced Alexa Hunches, a feature that will be available later this year and which is used to make suggestions while using the voice assistant. For example, if you say “Good night”, the assistant proposes to turn off all the lights in the house, if any are still on. Alexa Guard, on the other hand, serves as an anti-theft system: the assistant detects abnormal noises or the fire alarm, and sends a notification to the owner on his smartphone, if he is not at home.
Alexa for now is not available in Italy, but for some time Amazon has launched a first program dedicated to Italian developers, to experiment with the voice assistant and insert its features into their products. The arrival of the voice assistant, and of its now considerable amount of compatible devices, should also happen to us within a few months.
