Amazon Devices October Round-up: Alexa Smart Home, Fire TV Updates, and More
Amazon Alexa is getting smarter and more complex every day by finding new ways of applying learned behaviours to different scenarios. Currently built into over 100,000,000 devices worldwide, Alexa and the Echo suite of devices continue to evolve.
Check out the top Amazon devices and Alexa updates you need to know for the month of October 2022:
Meet the Amazon Alexa Smart Home of the Future
Amazon views a smart home as a place where devices as different as plugs, lights, vacuum cleaners, thermostats, and TV sets can talk to each other and make life easier for their owners.
The systems and devices all work together by Alexa, the AI voice technology developed by Amazon.
To bring this vision to life, last month, the team at Amazon Canada decided to completely transform a Toronto home to be Alexa-enabled.
Within the smart home, homeowners are able to use Alexa to:
- Get ready for a movie night without leaving the couch.
- Alexa can set the temperature, dim the lights and turn on the TV all through voice commands.
- Alexa can start the coffee maker and read through the calendar.
- In the office, Alexa can print off your to-do list, turn on and off your desk lamp, and more.
Amazon Appstore now has Android apps and games
You can now access Android apps and games from the Amazon Appstore, generally available in 31 countries, including:
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- Italy
- Japan
- Spain
- United Kingdom
- United States
Alexa Shortcut Panel Has Launched on Fire TV
The Alexa Shortcut Panel (ASP) has launched internationally on Fire TV.
On October 13, ASP completed rollout in the following locales: en-CA, fr-CA, es-US, it-IT, en-IN, ja-JP, es-MX, en-AU, pt-BR, en-GB, de-DE, fr-FR, es-ES, and hi-IN.
ASP can be launched with the short press of the mic/Alexa button on the remote. It displays localized hints for utterances that can be used to launch each tile and users can use their voices or the remote to make their selections.