Amazon Echo Brings AI Into Your Home

 Virtual Assistants  

Amazon has surprised everyone with the announcement of Echo, an always-on artificial intelligence appliance. Echo is voice-controlled and is powered by the cloud so it's always getting smarter.

Eearlier this year, a crowd-funded robot called Jibo was announced, said to bring social artificial intelligence into the home.  Now, Amazon has announced a product that beats Jibo and everybody else to market. The sytesm called Echo is basically a Siri-style AI connected to a speaker.

Echo is always on, listening for user's commands and questions that the virtual assistant can then respond to with information or by triggering a task.

The simple tube-shaped device has room-filling sound, and seven microphones on top, which use beam-forming audio detection to pinpoint your voice and ensure it can hear you no matter where you’re speaking to it in a room.

Echo can filter out background noise, including playing music, in order to better understand requests, and it processes voice input via Amazon’s cloud-based web servers, meaning that it can get better at identifying requests and responding to commands over time.

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Amazon Echo has a 360-degree-firing speaker, and it works with both Bluetooth from your device, as well as built-in support for playback of music from Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn and iHeartRadio. You can also get news and weather information from local radio, NPR, and ESPN via TuneIn, as well as other sources. It’ll answer queries and provide basic info from Wikipedia, give you word definitions, and even convert units on the fly.

Echo is always ready, connected, and fast:

• -News, weather, and information: Hear up-to-the-minute weather and news from a variety of sources, including local radio stations, NPR, and ESPN from TuneIn.

• -Music: Listen to your Amazon Music Library, Prime Music, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio.

• -Alarms, timers, and lists: Stay on time and organized with voice-controlled alarms, timers, shopping and to-do lists.

• -Questions and answers: Get information from Wikipedia, definitions, answers to common questions, and more.

• -More coming soon: Echo automatically updates through the cloud with new services and features.

Amazon’s Echo is $199, or $99 for Prime members for a limited time, and requires an invite from the company to even be ordered. Although there have been rumors that Amazon’s highly secretive special projects Lab126 was working on various gadgets earlier this year, Echo is a big surprise.

By 33rd Square

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