Amazon has announced a plethora of new smart devices powered by its voice-assistant Alexa, such as the Echo Plus, Echo Dot, Echo Show, Echo Auto, and more. As part of all these new refreshed products, the company also highlighted how smart Alexa has become, and in the quest to make it even smarter, Amazon has announced a ton of new skills for Alexa along with some developer tools.
Alexa has got plenty of new features, many of which are available later this year. These new features range from security to entertainment.
- Alexa Guard – When Guard mode is activated as you leave your home, certain Echo devices will be able to listen for sounds such as breaking glass, and smoke detector or carbon monoxide alarms, and then send alerts to you.
- Hunches – When used for a smart home, this feature “learns” your day-to-day habits and suggests when your lights or other connected smart devices are not in the state you normally leave them.
- Frustration-Free Setup – A new Wi-Fi simple setup feature allows connecting selected Amazon smart devices to a Wi-Fi network and Alexa by using voice commands or using the Alexa app to scan a barcode.
- Local Voice Control – Where the internet isn’t working or is unreliable, voice can still be used to control lights, plugs, and switches connected to an Echo with a built-in smart home hub.
- Video Doorbell – Echo Show will add a two-way talk feature that works with Ring and August doorbell cameras, allowing you to use a voice command to see and talk to whoever is at the door. Alexa will also be able to notify you when someone rings a Ring or August doorbell camera.
- Alexa Routine additions – Alexa routines will soon support actions based on location, timed delays, temperature and motion.
- Location-Based Reminders – You can also set reminders that are triggered when you leave or arrive at home or at work.
- Step-by-Step Cooking Instructions – Alexa supports walking through recipes, a step at a time, from Kitchen Stories, Allrecipes, Epicurious, Food52, TheKitchn, and SideChef.
- Multi-step Requests – Alexa can handle more complex requests with multiple steps. For example, users can add several items to their shopping list in a single command or turn up the volume and start a playlist on an Echo with one ask.
- Email Integration – After linking a Gmail, Outlook.com, or Hotmail.com account in the Alexa app, Alexa can check and reply to messages.
- Whisper Mode – With this update, whispering a request to Alexa elicits a whispered response.
- Tidal coming to Echo devices – The streaming music service Tidal will be available on all Echo devices later this year.
- Echo Stereo Pairing – Users can connect two of the same Echo devices to create a left-right stereo experience.
- Amazon Music New Release Notifications – Alexa can tell you when new albums or tracks for artists you follow are released.
- Preferred Speaker – You can now set a default speaker, and it can be an Echo device, or a third-party speaker with Alexa support or multi-room speakers.
- Visual Alexa Blueprints – Building on Alexa Blueprints, which is how Amazon lets anyone create a skill for Alexa, this new Alexa skill will users create and share personalized video messages.
- FreeTime features –The service that lets parents load up devices with kid-friendly content has added Kid Routines, combining actions like saying goodnight turning off the lights and starting white noise machines. Amazon also added family-friendly podcasts to FreeTime and new Alexa skills.
Apart from that, developers interested in building their own array of Alexa-powered devices will have some new tools to work with thanks to the arrival of a software development kit and a hardware reference design introduced by Amazon. The company unveiled the Alexa Presentation Language, which is basically a new design language that will help developers build and arrange their own skills on Alexa devices with a screen. The Alexa Presentation Language dictates how Alexa skills should work on screens, providing guidance around text size, slideshow displays, and layout design for developers, among other things.
from Beebom https://beebom.com/amazon-new-alexa-skills/
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