VOICE WITH EVERYTHING
Amazon’s personal assistant continues to ƂPF KVU YC[ KPVQ OQTG CPF OQTG RTQFWEVU
The CES show in Las Vegas back in January was flooded with Alexa- enabled hardware. That flood had slowed a little at IFA but not much, and devotees of Amazon’s personal assistant/ home automation system still had plenty of new goodies to choose from. Want voice control for your robot vacuum, because pressing a button on a remote control is just too damn time- consuming and laborious? You got it.
One item that particularly caught our eye was the Smarter Fridge Cam. As the name suggests, this is a camera that sits inside your fridge and takes a picture of its contents when prompted – which could be kind of useful if you’re at the supermarket and can’t remember if you need more cheese or not. Quite what you gain from linking this into the Alexa ecosystem we’re not sure, though. Of more obvious benefit are the number of higher- end audio products, from the likes of Harman-Kardon, that now have Alexa onboard. If you’re going to say “Alexa, play music” then the music that results may as well sound as good as possible, after all.
The usual privacy and security caveats around the Internet of Things apply, of course. But one thing’s for sure: in the race to equip everything in our homes with microphones and cameras, Amazon is definitely winning right now.