Exciting Upgrades Coming Soon to Amazon Alexa and the Smart Home

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It was an exciting week in the world of Amazon Alexa last week. Want to know about the latest Alexa updates? What does this mean for the smart home and Alexa voice applications (aka Skills)? Read on to find out more.

We got the news that Alexa will be upgraded to include Large Language Model (LLM) capability. This is a huge leap forward and will enable experiences like our Kindspace and My Scottish Community apps to become more intuitive and less transactional options-based. It’s particularly exciting for apps like this that have been built on a proprietary database. People will be able to retrieve information by asking questions in many different forms, instead of being restricted to keywords and menu options only. And in the smart home what this means is you’ll be able to create automations more simply with your voice. For example, “Alexa, every morning at 7am, gradually put on the bedroom lights, play wake-up music for Thomas in his bedroom, play my Flash Briefing and put on the kettle to boil”. Commands can be more natural and intuitive, instead of asking Alexa to turn on the heating, you could say “Alexa, I feel cold”, or “Alexa, the floor is dirty” and this will activate your robot vacuum cleaner.

All round the smart home control capability is set to improve, with better automations that are easier to set up and manage. A visual interface, that is essentially a little map of your house with the devices shown. They also have a new hub device in the Echo range with a built-in Zigbee smart home hub. This tablet-like device can be wall-mounted and used to control all your smart home systems as well as perform all the usual Alexa functions.

Unfortunately, as is always the case with Amazon, these new features will launch first in the US. Amazon hasn’t announced a date for availability in other countries. But we will keep you updated on what is the biggest upgrade to come to Alexa since its inception. The Echo Hub says Coming Soon on the Amazon website, you can register your interest for updates on the release date here: https://amzn.to/3RG461A

The potential is enormous, bringing us closer to the vision of a truly intelligent voice assistant. Here at TL Tech, we eagerly anticipate these latest Alexa innovations. But our focus remains on open ecosystems and complete smart home interoperability that helps you to live your life to the fullest. The smart home future is bright, and Alexa’s new brains will likely play a big role!