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Amazon is turning Alexa into a public address system for the home, with Echo speakers now able to make one-way announcements to summon the family down for dinner. Dubbed Alexa Announcements, the new feature is like a one-way intercom, Amazon suggests.
Amazon's Alexa is going hands-free on the company's affordable Android tablets, with a new voice mode added to the Fire 7 and Fire HD 8. The two tablets, which are priced from $49.99, have had Alexa support since launch, but it's not worked in quite the same way as you'd experience the voice assistant through an Echo or Echo Dot.
Amazon has announced an improvement to Alexa's Routines feature, enabling the digital personal assistant to play music as one of its preset routines. Routines, as usual, enables the user to automate certain series of actions, such as reading the news, turning on the lights, and getting the traffic based on a trigger phrase. Now users can make music part of those routines.
Mention the word “wearable device” to people and those in the know will immediately think one of two things: a smartwatch, a fitness tracker, or even both. Motiv, however, wanted to smash that preconceived notion into little bits that you can wrap around your finger. Last year, the startup launched the Motiv Ring, which, as the name so plainly implies, crams all those fitness tracking hardware into something you can easily put on your finger. This year, it is expanding that ring’s reach by making it possible to buy the “truly wearable wearable” in more places.
Back in the 2016, the then-freshly-formed Amazon Game Studios revealed its first three big titles: Breakaway, New World, and Crucible. Of these, Breakaway seemed to be the furthest along in development and Amazon's best chance to break into the growing eSports scene. Unfortunately, it seems Breakaway wasn't meant to be.
Amazon has turned Alexa into a donation-box rattling charity worker, adding the ability to donate charitable contributions by voice to its virtual assistant. Called Alexa Donations, the service launches today with almost fifty charities supported. However, Amazon says more are in the pipeline.
The music streaming market is a pretty vicious one and rivals, more often than not, want to make sure you are pretty much locked into their service. That pretty much means making sure you get your tunes from them and only from them. While some services do allow you to upload some of your own files, Amazon is slowly closing the door on that option. By the end of this month, it will remove music uploaded to its Music Storage locker unless you do one simple thing to postpone the inevitable.
Amazon's Alexa personal assistant now supports DVRs from certain companies, including TiVo, DISH, DirecTV, and Verizon. The new capabilities are made possible by an update to the Video Skill API, which Amazon announced today. With it, users can ask Alexa to schedule a new DVR recording and manage existing recordings, among other things. One example of a voice command now supported by the Video Skill API is, "Alexa, record TV Show Name."
Polk Audio will soon start taking preorders for Command Bar, its home theater sound bar with Alexa built-in. The sound bar is slim and relatively minimalist in design, offering HDMI 2.0b for use with most HDTVs and 4K TVs. Among other things, the sound bar features far-field microphones for listening to the user's voice. According to Polk, its Command Bar was the first sound bar with Alexa support to be announced.
Fortnite seems to be the game everyone is talking about at the moment, but that success isn't only benefiting Epic Games. Twitch has also been running a Prime promotion that hands out free Fortnite loot to anyone who signs up, and that has caused a lot of streamers - notably Ninja, who now holds the crown as the most popular streamer on Twitch - to see an influx of subscribers. Twitch is looking to keep the gravy train going by adding more loot to its Fortnite Twitch Prime Pack, which will be available from here on out.
There's an array of white-box devices coming with Amazon's Alexa inside. A white-box device, in this case, means a fully operational piece of hardware made by a company willing to work with big-brand-name companies to sell said products with different brand names attached. Companies that make white-box devices are called Original Design Manufacturers (ODM). Amazon just revealed a whole mess of ODM partners rolling with Alexa technology.
Today Dropbox launched their IPO to what's currently considered a rather excited public. The stock sits at +35.67% this afternoon, and it's daily high is at $28.49 USD. This public offering came just over a decade after Dropbox showed their first presentation for seed money. Today we're having a peek at that original pitch, finding it just about as fresh as it was 10 years ago. A surprisingly small amount has changed in Dropbox's business space since then.