Amazon Alexa

Thanks for hanging with us! We’re gonna be physically checking out all of the stuff announced today in just a few minutes. So we’ll be back. The same can’t be said for David Limp who thanked his coworkers as he ended his final hardware event at Amazon.

Amazon just announced a new Echo Hub at Amazon’s Fall hardware event. The tablet-like screen mounts to the wall and costs $179.99.

It’s a Zigbee hub, Thread border router, and Matter controller in one, with a smart home widget interface that automatically appears as you approach.

Amazon says it can control devices in milliseconds, but the big question is how snappy will its touchscreen be?

This map view makes a lot of sense for control of your smart home, and anything is better than the current Alexa app UI.

The Blink Sync Module Pro extends the range of Blink’s cameras beyond Wi-Fi, costs $49.99, and will be available early next year.

The new Blink outdoor battery pack will extend the new Blink Cam 4’s two-year battery life to four years. This was first promised about two years ago — so it’s nice to see it finally arrive.

At its Devices and Services event, Amazon announced that it’s bringing ambient art to new and existing Echo Show and Fire TV devices. What’s more, it can generate or alter images for you on the fly, right on your TV using voice commands.

Previously, the ambient art feature was only available on Fire TVs.

It comes with support for Wi-Fi 6e for less congested streaming, a 2GHz quad-core processor, Dolby Vision, HDR, HDR 10+, and Dolby Atmos Audio.

It’ll cost $59.99 and can be pre-ordered today. So, come on — who is going to save $10 and buy the regular Fire TV stick?

It’s got Bluetooth and should work with all Fire TV products, no set up required. That’s a leg up on many other soundbars, which require at least a little time and navigating a few menus in an app to get up and running.

It’s available today for $119.99.

After publishing Amazon reached out to confirm that yes, the Soundbar will work with any smart TV via HDMI.

The new Alexa LLM will power a more conversational search experience on Fire TV.

Using the Alexa voice remote you can dig down through options on the myriad of streaming services and even ask it to narrow down choices based on random facts like “Which movie should have won an Oscar but didn’t?”

Now, who is making that call.

Please no one tell Tom Cruise, or he might vault into the building from 300 feet in the air to turn the motion smoothing off.

Amazon has a new has two new Fire Kids tablets. There’s a new Fire HD 10 Kids Pro for “older” kids and a Fire HD 10 Kids. The new hardware will start at $189.99 and should be about 25-percent faster than the previous generation of Fire HD 10 Kids tablets. They’ll sport 1080p 10.1-inch displays, 3GB of RAM and up to 13 hours of battery life.

The new Echo Pop Kids will cost $49.99 and include Amazon’s Kids Plus service.

But, boy, do they look ugly.

This accessibility feature Amazon just announced lets you use your eye gaze to control smart home devices, audio, video, and more Alexa features. It will be available later this year for free, on the Fire Max 11 tablet.

The voice assistant that Amazon is working on with BMW will work with Amazon’s LLM for more conversational AI, the company said in its Devices and Services event today.

Character.ai already lets you chat with plenty of famous people via a chat bot, but Character.ai is now coming to Alexa-powered devices, which means you can have a conversation with Grace Hopper (Amazon’s example) or Aristotle or even fictional characters.

This will be very dangerous for those of us whom harass our voice assistants when we’re bored at home. I cannot wait to ask Frodo how he feels about current events in the United States.

The announcement came during today’s Amazon hardware event.

This event is fast becoming the Alexa show instead of the Alexa-based hardware show, and with demos this neat that’s okay! The demo playing right now showcases a more emotive Alexa who analyzed Van Gogh’s Starry Night in a much more natural and expressive way than the current Alexa.

The best way to describe it is Alexa sounds...richer? That robotic cadence Alexa and other voice assistants has softened to something much more natural sounding.

Wow, the new Alexa sounds way more ... normal. Limp is demoing it live on stage and having a (somewhat successful) conversation about — what else — football.

Limp is showing off the new LLM powering Alexa at the event, and it's slow, much like the Wi-Fi currently at the Amazon event, but it did know Limp’s favorite football team without prompting.

And apparently, Alexa is a Seahawks fan.

The most impressive part of this troubled demo was the total lack of wake words between each question. Limp grilled it like a 5-year-old when they see you have a Nintendo Switch and apart from Wi-Fi hiccups it sounded like a normal conversation.

That’s ... impressive.

Shown today during Amazon’s hardware event, this will be a huge improvement. Personally, I’ve found smart displays are often slower than the standard Echo speakers.

The Echo Show 8 will have “spacial audio” and “room adaptation” software. That should make it behave sort of like Sonos speakers have for years.

The home screen will also change depending on your proximity to it. Changing content as you approach so its easier to interact with via touch, and then simplify when you step away.

It will be available starting next month, pre-orders start today and it will retail for $149.99

Dave Limp says a superhuman voice assistant is within reach as he takes us through a history of its efforts in the smart home at Amazon’s Fall hardware event. There are nearly a billion devices connected to Alexa today, he says. Yes, mainly for timers and alarms — but also smart home, which he says is up 25 percent year on year.

David Limp’s on stage preparing to announce a whole lot of hardware. There’s the stuff we’re expecting, like a new Echo and Fire TV, and maybe even Alexa powered by generative AI. We’ll see what else gets announced.

This followed an opening video showing off, naturally, the power of Alexa, and David’s own reminder that he’s moving on from Amazon.

At Silicon Labs’ Works With conference today, the company launched the SG23 and SG28 SoCs, new chips designed for Amazon Sidewalk. It also announced more tools to help developers build devices for Amazon’s new long-range, low-bandwidth IoT network.

This means we might soon see some useful gadgets leveraging the free-to-use protocol that covers 90 percent of the US population (thanks to being embedded in practically every Echo smart speaker ever made.)

All I really want is that pet tracker Amazon promised us.