If you're in the mood to combine your Amazon and Microsoft-made smart assistants on any one device, today's your day. Alexa can open Cortana and Cortana can open Alexa. Because there might be a very rare instance in which you want one or the other, this particular tie-in is live. It's just live in preview mode when this article is first published, but live nonetheless.
![Just 2% of Alexa users tried to buy stuff with voice in 2018 [UPDATE: Amazon Statement]](https://c.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/echo.jpg)
Sources this week suggested that Amazon's Alexa devices aren't working exactly the way they'd been expected to work with regard to other Amazon products. In the report, it's said that in the year 2018, (so far,) just 2% of users of Alexa products tried to purchase a product on Amazon with their voice. Of those that tried to make a purchase with Alexa, a whopping 90% never tried to buy another product with their voice through the service.
Everything these days seem to be driven by bots, specifically chatbots. That’s true whether they’re simply bots you type commands to or, more popularly, speak to. But despite the ubiquity and popularity of Google Assistant, our TVs, sometimes the first appliance to become smart in our houses, are still beholden to the decades-old remote control. If you own one of DISH’s Hopper family of receivers, that’s no longer true and you can take it easy even when you can’t find that elusive remote.
Amazon and Microsoft just combined forces officially, tag-teaming their personal assistants Alexa and Cortana through the future. These two voice-activated smart assistant overlord software and cloud intelligence systems will work together on devices of all sorts. In short, it would seem that Alexa is going to handle "personal" stuff while Cortana's going to handle all the "business."
Kinect is back, and it wants to make the Internet of Things smarter and less reliant on the cloud. Microsoft has taken the wraps off Project Kinect for Azure today at Build 2018, its annual developer event, and if you thought uses for the fiendishly clever depth-sensing camera began and ended with Xbox gaming, think again.
Apple's HomePod smart speaker released earlier this year with impressive audio quality and Apple Music integration, but there's no denying that the tech powering the device, Siri, still lags behind virtual assistant rivals like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant. While Siri handles music playback requests with ease, it still struggles with general knowledge questions that the others have no problem with. It seems Apple is in a hurry to address this shortcoming, however, as indicated by a big increase in Siri-related hiring.
Today we're having a peek at the latest way to delete all the Alexa voice recordings Amazon has for a single user. When you speak with Alexa, Amazon uses your voice to improve the service you receive from said Alexa - your unique Alexa. To do this, Amazon keeps a recording of your voice each time you summon Alexa. You may find that nefarious, or maybe you find it entirely reasonable - either way, you might want to know how to delete those recordings of your voice.
Alexa is easily the current leader of the growing virtual assistant market, and Amazon is keen to stay ahead of competition from Google and Apple. The company's newest feature for Alexa is dubbed "follow-up mode," and it makes it easier for users to ask multiple questions in succession by dropping the need to repeat the wake-up command.
Voice control is the latest fad in consumer tech and that reality is underscored by a new announcement from HP: it will soon offer voice-activated home printers. By doing so, the company explains, it will be the first printer business to offer "intuitive voice commands" via major smart speaker products, namely through Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana.
Like just about every big tech company these days, Chinese web giant Baidu is getting in on the smart speaker game. But the company is doing things noticeably different from Amazon or Google, despite selling its new Raven H speaker device. Instead the key product is the assistant software itself, the DuerOS AI platform, and Baidu's goal is to have it used in hardware from other manufacturers.
Amazon's smart assistance service, Alexa, has already made the jump from connected speaker to a number of different smart home products, but its next location will be portable devices. The company has announced a new "Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit" that will allow hardware manufacturers to integrate Alexa with wearable products like headphones and smartwatches.
Paper Signals from Google controls tiny paper contraptions with Google Assistant. This set of experiments is not something completely inaccessible by the average user. Instead, it's a super-inexpensive (or super free) set of instructions for creating moving objects that are controlled by a set of equations, activated by Google Assistant.