Amazon’s products continue to push Alexa into every corner of your life

SEATTLE — Amazon has a plan to make sure Alexa is everywhere we go by adding the voice assistant to glasses, wireless ear buds and a shiny black ring.

Those wearables are just a few of the newest grab bag of products announced by Amazon on Wednesday as part of its push to get a little bit of Alexa into every corner of our lives. But as those gadgets move from customers’ kitchens and living rooms to their ears and faces, the company will learn how far consumers will be willing to trust Amazon with their privacy.

To head off such concerns, Amazon Venior Vice President for Devices Dave Limp listed features the company includes to address privacy concerns in the first 10 minutes of his 75-minute presentation.

Because Amazon lacks an Alexa-powered smartphone like Google and Apple, it’s looking for other ways to make its always-listening assistant omnipresent. In addition to the wearables, it announced an updated Echo Dot that shows the time and a new 8-inch Echo Show. There was also the Echo Glow, which is essentially a soothing Alexa-controlled night light. The Alexa-controlled Smart Oven can read bar codes on packaged foods and automatically cook them according to the directions, while a new Ring doorbell adds Alexa to the front door to chat up visitors and take a message if you’re away.

(Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The online retail giant has previously taken a similar spaghetti-against-the-wall approach to such events, introducing dozens of new features and gadgets like an AI-assistant-powered microwave and a wall clock that could show a timer. But many of those devices haven’t exactly taken off. For example, last year’s Echo Auto device, which retroactively brings Alexa to older vehicles, was still available only by invitation as of Tuesday. On Wednesday, it was open to all customers.

Amazon has recently jumped in on the traditional fall events that technology companies, including Apple and Google, host to highlight their new products, most of which are released in time for the holiday season. But Amazon takes a looser approach than its sometimes-rival Apple. Instead of showing off a handful of nearly finished products, Amazon is more likely to share a long list of releases of varying quality and readiness, not all of which will make it to consumers.

Meanwhile, Amazon has spent much of the past five years pushing its Alexa voice assistant into as many nooks and crannies of people’s lives as possible. It lives in the company’s Echo smart speakers, but it also works with third-party speakers, as well as cars, kitchen appliances and a fancy toilet. The research firm eMarketer says Amazon Echos will make up 63.2 percent of the smart-speaker market this year, while Google’s Home speakers will take 31 percent.

But while Amazon leads in smart speakers, a phone is conspicuously missing from its strategy. Google and Apple sell phones with their own smart assistants built into the operating system and resting in billions of pockets. That advantage is crucial as the tech giants fight for what may be the next big battleground: conversational computing. Each company is racing to emerge with the dominant voice technology that consumers will use to tell their gadgets to play music, turn on lights and find information.

And while Amazon has a head start in bringing speech recognition to consumers’ homes, it faces a huge hurdle competing against Apple and Google, whose technology runs most smartphones around the globe, in the mobile world.

That was part of what the firm tried to address Wednesday. In addition to new hardware, Amazon announced a wide range of new software features and products. Alexa can now tell when you are frustrated with it by detecting changes in the volume and tone of your voice and choice of words. It will change how it replies accordingly, sheepishly apologize and try to correct course. And like Google Assistant before it, Alexa is adding the ability to use celebrity voices, starting with Samuel L. Jackson.

Still, Amazon’s critics have questioned the company’s commitment to privacy. Many have pointed to Amazon’s facial recognition technology, which is taking off in use by law enforcement, as posing risks to civil liberties.

Bezos told reporters at the event that the area of facial recognition is “a perfect example of where regulation is needed.” He said it can be positive, and you don’t want to pump the brakes. “At the same time, there’s lots of potential for abuses with that kind of technology, and so you do want regulations. It’s a classic dual use kind of technology.”