IN TECH Alexa, innovation in CES spotlight
Smart glasses latest to sport digital assistant
“Alexa, what is it I’m looking at?” You’re used to summoning help from Amazon Alexa, the voice inside Amazon’s Echo smart speaker, in your kitchen or by your bed.
If Amazon has its way, the artificial intelligence-infused Alexa digital assistant will be pretty much at your beck and call everywhere, and that means the bathroom, your computer and even in a product such as the see-through augmented reality glasses a company called Vuzix will showcase this week during the mammoth CES tech show in Las Vegas.
Spreading Alexa’s voice has been Amazon’s vision for some time and was a major theme at last year’s CES, too, with Alexa starting to infiltrate cars, fridges and other household appliances. This year, Amazon and its partners are taking Alexa even further, which seems critical since rival Google has similar ambitions for its own Google Assistant, the voice inside Android phones and Google Home speakers.
At CES this time around, Amazon partners HP, Acer and Asus announced that Alexa will be coming to select Microsoft Windows 10 computers in 2018.
Adding a digital assistant to a computer is nothing new, and how often, and in what capacity, you’ll call upon Alexa on such machines remains to be seen. Apple’s own vocal assistant Siri is a staple feature on Macs, and Windows 10 PCs sport Microsoft’s counterpart Cortana. Among its own capabilities, Cortana can chime in to help you set up a new Windows 10 PC.
One place you might find Alexa is in the bathroom, with Kohler, for example, adding Amazon’s assistant to what it calls the Verdera Voice Lighted Mirror. You can control the lights with your voice. Or you ask Alexa, among its numerous other skills, to catch you up on the news, weather and traffic while you’re shaving, say. The smart mirror will cost $999 on up and will be available in late March.
But Amazon wants Alexa nearby when you’re out of the house, not just on your phone or in the car or on a laptop. Just ahead of CES on Friday, Amazon announced the Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit toolkit. It’s for device makers and manufacturers to bring Alexa to a gaggle of on-the-go products, including socalled hearables, headphones, smart watches, fitness devices and the like. The kit will be made available to manufacturers later this year.
Amazon has already said that Bose, Jabra, iHome, Beyerdynamic and Bowers & Wilkins, among others, plan on adding Alexa to various Bluetooth audio devices in the coming months.
One of the most intriguing products to watch with Alexa will be the Vuzix Blade AR Smart Glasses that might give life to a product category that — with Google Glass — garnered attention a few years back but has failed to get anywhere with consumers. Google Glass itself may make a return of sorts in the enterprise market.
The business, or at least so-called prosumer market, might be where we first see the Vuzix glasses. The idea behind the specs, which resemble sunglasses, is that you’ll pair them with a smartphone you can leave in your pocket and purse. Then, with Alexa’s help, you can have the glasses project directions, menus, weather reports, stock quotes, sports scores, social feeds other hands-free alerts on an image that appears in front of your eyes. And yes, you’ll still be able to see your real life physical surroundings at the same time. The glasses weigh less than 3 ounces, but at around $1,000 they’ll weigh heavily on your wallet.