Amazon

This summer, Amazon will launch a number of warehouses designed specifically to hold hazardous materials, such as the bear mace that caused some of its employees grief last year. The company has been developing these facilities for months, it confirmed in a recent report, including a 500,000sqft fulfillment center that will open in Mississippi in coming weeks. These facilities will be home to products that range from common cleaning agents to nail polish.

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Today Amazon revealed their latest Amazon Fire 7 for $50 USD, and called it "All New". Over the past several years, Amazon's released several Amazon Fire tablets, and other products, with the words "All New" up front of their title. If you're considering purchasing a tablet from Amazon because you've always wanted a tablet and $50 is too good to pass up - PLEASE read on.

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Twitch Prime offers some pretty nifty perks to people who play a lot of video games or watch a lot of live streams, and now the same is true for people who watch a lot of anime. Today, Twitch Prime announced a new promotion that will see it hand out 30-day subscriptions to Crunchyroll Premium to all of its members. The promotion kicks off today and runs through June 13th, so you've got a month to redeem this trial to Crunchyroll.

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During its Alexa event back in September, Amazon announced a new home security feature called Alexa Guard. With it, Amazon said, you could turn your Echo devices into something of a watchdog while you're away, having them monitor for the sound of breaking glass or alerts from your smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. Today, a bit more than half a year after it was first revealed, Alexa Guard is starting its roll out to Echo owners.

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Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson has announced that Amazon will target toxic school supplies after many were allegedly found for sale on its platform. The Attorney General's Office conducted an investigation into toxic children's products that were allegedly available to purchase on Amazon, ultimately finding that some of them contained high levels of cadmium and lead.

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Amazon announced a new security camera today called the Blink XT2. This camera was made by Blink Home, a company acquired by Amazon back in December of 2017 (see story in timeline of links below). This camera is one hundred dollars and has no contracts or monthly fees. Also the camera works for two full years on the power of two AA batteries.

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Alexa has been available on Windows 10 hardware by way of an official app since November, but to a lot of people, that app sort of felt like a half-measure. The main problem is that you can't simply summon Alexa through voice commands like you can if you were speaking to an Echo device. When it comes to voice assistants, the "voice" part turns out to be pretty crucial.

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Smart speakers and their cousins smart displays and smart thermostats are the new darlings of the consumer tech market. The convenience and sometimes entertainment provided by these products and services seem to outweigh privacy concerns in users' minds. Many simply accept that companies need them to improve their service and presume said companies will protect their privacy. That's not always the case and, thanks to a series of reports from various news sources, Amazon's Alexa might come out as the worst offender.

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Alexa is about to receive an update that improve Routines for users who schedule their favorite actions. One particular change went live today, adding the option to trigger routines a certain amount of time after an alarm goes off. In the near future, Alexa users will also be able to link their routines to sunrise and sunset, among other things.

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Not too long ago, Amazon made the almost scandalous announcement that it would be letting its couriers into houses via its Amazon Key system. Then this year, it expanded that to garages and finally to cars. Fortunately, the rollout of Amazon Key has been relatively uneventful and companies are, in fact, siding with the retail giant. The latest to join that club is Ford, who will allow select models to become your mailbox to keep your package safe, while hopefully also keeping your car safe.

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Amazon has no plans to transition to fully automated warehouses at any point in the near future, the company has confirmed. The news addresses concerns over whether the company's warehouse workers will soon be replaced with automated technologies. Though Amazon is working on developing and implementing that tech, it isn't anywhere close to ready to do everything human employees can accomplish.

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One of the biggest consideration and sometimes limitation of voice assistants is that they are, by nature, intricately tied to the spoken language. While many people do speak English and many of its variants, not everyone does. And even some of those that do only consider English to be a second and sometimes unnatural language. That is why support for other languages have been slow to roll out and it will only be later this year that Amazon Alexa will be able to start speaking Spanish in the US.

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