Internet retail titan Amazon.com Inc on Thursday introduced a home virtual assistant always at the ready to answer questions, fetch news, play music or help with to-do lists.
The cloud-based brains referred to as “Alexa” are built into Echo speakers and seen as a challenge to “Siri” virtual assistants in Apple Inc’s coveted mobile devices.
Echo became available on an invitation-only basis at a price of US$199, or US$99 for those who pay for the Seattle-based company’s Prime subscription service.
“Echo’s brain is in the cloud, running on Amazon Web Services so it continually learns and adds more functionality over time,” Amazon said on a Web page where people could request invitations to buy the Bluetooth-enabled speakers.
“The more you use Echo, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary and personal preferences.”
A ring of microphones built into can-shaped Echo speakers enable the devices to identify voices even when music is playing, according to Amazon.
Echo accesses news, weather, streaming music and more using wireless Internet connections.
Echo can also be managed remotely using free applications built for smartphones powered by Apple, Android or Amazon’s Fire operating software.
Internet titans such as Apple and Google Inc are eager to make their platforms hubs that exploit powers of smartphones, tablets or other devices to serve as controls for entertainment, information, temperature, lighting and more in “smart homes,” according to Forrester analyst James McQuivey.
Echo could let Amazon jump ahead in that race with the first device in homes that is designed to be listening and ready to act whenever people might think of something they want or need to buy.
“Sure, it doubles as a connected speaker and some people will end up buying it for that, but the Echo will only achieve its real purpose when you start asking it questions, having it complete tasks for you — especially shopping tasks — just the way Apple hopes its users will interact with Apple Watch,” McQuivey said.
“Amazon has a unique ability to monetize the microphone, principally by putting microphones in places where you will think of things you want to buy — the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room — things which Amazon can then easily fulfill,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy