Among the announcements were United States vehicle giant Ford unveiling an Alexa-powered in-car assistant that would “allow Ford owners to play and resume audiobooks, order items on Amazon, search for and transfer local destinations to the in-car navigation system, and more”.
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The virtual assistant Alexa stole this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) show which popped up in everything from copycat speakers to robots and connected to fridges. The World Is Next.
Alexa scored well at CES 2017, if the metric of measurement is how many new products included Alexa-integration. That is the beauty of AVS, since it is merely an agent, providing the most rudimentary of instructions to those devices that will do the “thinking”. Google, Microsoft, and Apple are coming out with their own voice-activated speaker technologies, but Amazon remains the company to beat. In addition, Amazon explains that accidental orders can also be returned for free. Amazon’s Echo and Dot are voice-controlled devices that can respond to user’s voice commands.
Amazon, Inc. launched the Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service in June 2015 and now has more than 3,000 skills available. Cortana will have the ability for controlling smart home devices and she will also continue to make predictions for National Football League or the Oscars.
Industry leaders like Amazon and Google say they take privacy and security very seriously, promising to erase certain recordings and encrypt data from conversations with assistants. It has the capacity to interact with almost every aspect of a user’s home, including: lights, thermostats, and door locks. Patton told the tech blog that he didn’t think any devices actually completed their purchases.
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However, it is a feature that has seemingly cost users money without their knowledge. Adverts for Echo on the TV invariably trigger Echo devices but also things like sponsorship bumpers for “Lexus” cars have been sending ours doolally over Christmas, and on one occasion Dacia too. Speculation from Fortune revealed that the company’s popular digital assistant placed orders on dollhouses after picking up on the story of a young girl from Texas, who placed orders of a dollhouse and four pounds of cookies with Alexa’s assistance.
