The folks at Sengled brought a very vintage-looking piece of tech to Las Vegas this week, to CES 2020. This is the Sengled Smart LED Edison Filament Bulb, with a design that's decidedly old-school. Sengled also has a set of new smart (and not so smart) lighting and smart home solutions out at CES 2020, including Smart LED Candle Light Bulbs, a new Smart Hub, and a Smart Plug with Energy Monitoring.
Lamborghini is adding Alexa as co-pilot on its Huracán EVO sports car, with Amazon's assistant being embedded into the dashboard this year. The infotainment upgrade will allow for voice control not only over the usual Alexa features like general knowledge questions and entertainment, but of the car's own functionality too.
Are you ready for the brave new world of Digital Showering? Kohler certainly hopes so, the bathroom company continuing its geek-upgrade with a new showerhead with Amazon Alexa baked in, a smarter toilet with touch-free flush, and a shower system that looks more like a Star Trek prop. Getting wet has never been so exciting.
CES 2020 is set to be the place where we finally ditch this "hub" business for Smart Home devices. GE has the way forward, it would seem, with their C by GE Hubless Three-Wire Smart Switch and two Hubless Dimmer models. They're able to use smart assistant products for control without the need for a "hub" product for connection.
If you like the idea of the Echo Wall Clock but not its basic, dark design, Citizen has launched a more appealing alternative: the Citizen Smart Clock. This model features a cream-colored face covered with protective glass and surrounded by a silver frame. The model works with Echo devices in order to manage the time using the Alexa personal assistant.
As previously promised, Amazon has released its first celebrity voice for Alexa Voice Service. Starting today, Alexa users can get the Samuel L. Jackson skill for a minuscule $0.99, enabling them to ask the personal assistant questions and get responses from Jackson himself. The launch of celebrity voices on the platform was first announced by Amazon in September.
Amazon has announced a major change to its Alexa Voice Service: it is now available to manufacturers for devices that feature as little as a single megabyte (1MB) of RAM. The new minimum requirement, which is considerably lower than the previous 100MB minimum, opens the door for Alexa across a vast number of connected gadgets for the home, office, cars, and more.
Only days after the same support arrived on Sonos speakers, Spotify has announced that its Free service is now accessible through Amazon's Alexa personal assistant. This marks the first time users have been able to access the free version of the service using Alexa, including on smart speakers and the Fire TV platform. The move follows Amazon's recent expansion of its own free music availability.
Amazon may have had a great gush of new products last month, but it's back on the announcement train today with the Fire TV Blaster, an IR blaster for Alexa. It'll give Amazon's assistant greater control over your home entertainment devices, such as being able to power on TVs, projectors, audio systems, and more.
Smoking meat might seem like a simple matter of combining, well, meat and smoke, but Traeger's range of connected grills are now adding Alexa support for more straightforward remote control. Owners of Traeger WiFIRE-enabled models will be able to use Amazon's assistant both to control their pellet grill and to remotely check its current status.
Amazon has rolled out a new feature it calls 'Alexa Home Theatre System' that enables its home entertainment customers to play audio from a Fire TV through an Echo smart speaker. The feature has launched with support for select Fire TV and Echo models at this time, including for some of the older units. Multiple configurations can be used ranging from a 1.0 to 2.1 setup.
Black Friday is coming but the holiday shopping season isn't waiting for its traditional kick-off, though while tech deals may be everywhere you look, there are some gadgets I won't be putting into my cart. Smart speakers and, more recently, smart displays have become a go-to gift for many over the past few years, but in 2019 they may not be quite so warmly received.