Amazon

There are some people already complaining about what has been dubbed as "Zoom fatigue," but it seems there is really no end in sight for video meetings. In fact, some companies are pushing that old-new communication medium even further, integrating video conferencing software anywhere they see fit. The latest to do so is Amazon, which is announcing support for Zoom on its Fire TV Cube to bring those meetings to an even larger screen if your laptop isn't big enough for that.

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A new collection of games was revealed in Amazon Prime's "Free Games with Prime" for August of 2021. Games are available for claim by Amazon Prime members for a limited time, then remain available for use from that time thereafter. The turnover from one month to the other ushers out the game Battlefield 1 and in Battlefield V, making July and August a real decent pair of months for users that've never played Battlefield games before.

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Amazon's Kindles have long been the device of choice by voracious readers, especially those that want to take their books with them anywhere. Of course, the books they hold inside don't come from thin air and have to be downloaded directly to the device or transferred from a computer. The former naturally requires an Internet connection, which almost all Kindles have. Unfortunately, some older models support don't support anything beyond 3G networks, and those will lose their ability to connect to the Internet by the end of the year.

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Amazon's Alexa has a new voice option, and if you've wanted something new in your conversations, switching to a different sounding assistant could do the trick. The company quietly rolled out the new Alexa voice earlier this month, and changing over is straightforward.

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Amazon is working on accepting Bitcoin payments and could even create its own token, according to a new leak, though it's unclear just how eager the world's biggest retailer is to wade into the volatile world of crypto. Though it may have cornered the market in online sales, Amazon's taste for currency currently skews old-school.

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It's not just you, it's Steam, PlayStation, Disney, GoDaddy, Amazon, UPS, LastPass, and a whole bunch of other websites that are out-of-commission right this minute. One part of the problem appears to be an issue with the content distribution network (CDN) Akamai. Tracking for the service suggests that they're experiencing an "emerging issue with the Edge DNS service."

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Alexa Skills may have proved popular for adding new functionality to Amazon's virtual assistant, but the company is aiming to make the chatty smart home tech clever enough that users don't need to go out looking for third-party add-ons. Currently, there are more than 100,000 Alexa Skills - effectively apps for the voice-first assistant - available, and with that comes confusion.

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Verizon Fios TV is the latest company to do away with [some*] hardware TV box requirements on a wider variety of devices with Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Instead of requiring a Verizon Fios TV box on every TV with which a user would want said TV functionality, Verizon released apps for Fios TV for Apple TV 4K, Apple TV HD, and Amazon Fire TV devices [that allows a user to reduce the number of boxes they use to one*]. These are only the latest platforms on which the Verizon Fios TV app is available. Switching from Verizon Fios TV hardware boxes to Fios TV apps on smart TV devices could potentially reduce a Fios TV user's monthly bill by a substantial amount.

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Voice-controlled AI-powered assistants are pretty smart these days, but they didn't exactly start out that way. They weren't particularly smart about the way they sounded, at least not in the beginning. Almost all of these smart assistants, regardless of company or name, started out with a female voice before finally allowing users to pick from a variety of voices. The lone holdout among the major AI assistants is Alexa, but Amazon is finally letting users pick a male-sounding voice, eight years after the assistant debuted.

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It's been a rough day for some unfortunate PC gamers. Amazon's upcoming MMO, New World, entered closed beta yesterday, and it didn't take long before some participants reported that the game bricked their GPUs. These weren't aging GPUs trying to run a game beyond their capability, but rather top-of-the-line RTX 3090 GPUs.

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Samsung today announced the sixth-generation Family Hub smart fridge, and with it, we're getting a big addition. While Family Hub refrigerators have primarily supported Samsung's Bixby and SmartThings platforms in the past, this is the first generation that will come with Amazon's Alexa built-in. That, obviously, gives users more flexibility in how they integrate a Family Hub fridge with their smart home setup.

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This months' Amazon Prime Gaming free download setup is live with the games Battlefield 1 (now) and Battlefield V (soon) on PC. Much like previously offered "free" games through Prime Gaming, the user must fulfill several requirements before they can make with the downloading and the playing of the game. The word "free" is thrown around a lot in today's wild world of downloadable and playable games for PC - the definition of "free" isn't always the same from platform to platform.

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