More from All the biggest announcements from Amazon’s September 2023 product launch event
It comes with support for Wi-Fi 6e for less congested streaming, a 2GHz quad-core processor, Dolby Vision, HDR, HDR 10+, and Dolby Atmos Audio.
It’ll cost $59.99 and can be pre-ordered today. So, come on — who is going to save $10 and buy the regular Fire TV stick?
It’s got Bluetooth and should work with all Fire TV products, no set up required. That’s a leg up on many other soundbars, which require at least a little time and navigating a few menus in an app to get up and running.
It’s available today for $119.99.
After publishing Amazon reached out to confirm that yes, the Soundbar will work with any smart TV via HDMI.
It has WI-Fi 6, streams in 4K, and is apparently 30 percent more powerful. At $49.99 it’s not the most powerful one in the bunch, but it looks good!
We’re watching a montage of stuff coming to Amazon’s MGM Plus service, and all I can think is “what in the world is MGM Plus.” Amazon has Prime Video, Freevee, MGM Plus, and who knows what else. It’s a mess. But I like a bunch of these, so that’s something!
The new Alexa LLM will power a more conversational search experience on Fire TV.
Using the Alexa voice remote you can dig down through options on the myriad of streaming services and even ask it to narrow down choices based on random facts like “Which movie should have won an Oscar but didn’t?”
Now, who is making that call.
Please no one tell Tom Cruise, or he might vault into the building from 300 feet in the air to turn the motion smoothing off.
They have longer battery life, multi-point pairing to other devices, and a redesigned audio system for the open speakers to work better. But most importantly, they look pretty nice! Amazon has a bunch of different frame styles and lens options, too.
The smart glasses race is very much on, and Echo Frames definitely seem to have the lead at least aesthetically.
Amazon has a new has two new Fire Kids tablets. There’s a new Fire HD 10 Kids Pro for “older” kids and a Fire HD 10 Kids. The new hardware will start at $189.99 and should be about 25-percent faster than the previous generation of Fire HD 10 Kids tablets. They’ll sport 1080p 10.1-inch displays, 3GB of RAM and up to 13 hours of battery life.
The new Echo Pop Kids will cost $49.99 and include Amazon’s Kids Plus service.
But, boy, do they look ugly.
You can identify emergency contacts for your Echo to call if something goes wrong, or ask Alexa for assistance, and the new $5.99-a-month service will connect you to someone who can help. Smart idea for a new product, especially built into a device you can shout at from across the room!
This accessibility feature Amazon just announced lets you use your eye gaze to control smart home devices, audio, video, and more Alexa features. It will be available later this year for free, on the Fire Max 11 tablet.
The voice assistant that Amazon is working on with BMW will work with Amazon’s LLM for more conversational AI, the company said in its Devices and Services event today.
Character.ai already lets you chat with plenty of famous people via a chat bot, but Character.ai is now coming to Alexa-powered devices, which means you can have a conversation with Grace Hopper (Amazon’s example) or Aristotle or even fictional characters.
This will be very dangerous for those of us whom harass our voice assistants when we’re bored at home. I cannot wait to ask Frodo how he feels about current events in the United States.
The announcement came during today’s Amazon hardware event.
Amazon says that all devices it announces today will have their carbon footprint published in product sustainability fact sheets. Almost every device announced today will come in 100% recycled packaging in the US.
Amazon also announced that they’ve contracted enough renewable energy capacity through new wind and solar farms to equal the expected energy use of those devices.
At some Amazon events we’d be like 65 gadgets deep right now, and everyone would be shouting Alexa at a bunch of rings and sunglasses and stuff. But the story this year is, instead, a large language model. Which is probably more important than your average Echo device! “Better Alexa” is clearly the focus this year, not “More Alexa.”
This event is fast becoming the Alexa show instead of the Alexa-based hardware show, and with demos this neat that’s okay! The demo playing right now showcases a more emotive Alexa who analyzed Van Gogh’s Starry Night in a much more natural and expressive way than the current Alexa.
The best way to describe it is Alexa sounds...richer? That robotic cadence Alexa and other voice assistants has softened to something much more natural sounding.
Not surprising: Amazon is making big moves in generative AI. More surprising: it’s really convinced that AI should be like a person to talk to and work with.
Which is kind of the opposite of what we’re learning about chatbots! The more human and confident tools like ChatGPT, Bard, and Alexa sound, the more problematic it can be when they get stuff wrong. Really interesting that Amazon’s all in on this “talk to AI like it’s a person” strategy for Alexa.
Wow, the new Alexa sounds way more ... normal. Limp is demoing it live on stage and having a (somewhat successful) conversation about — what else — football.
Limp is showing off the new LLM powering Alexa at the event, and it’s slow, much like the Wi-Fi currently at the Amazon event, but it did know Limp’s favorite football team without prompting.
And apparently, Alexa is a Seahawks fan.
The most impressive part of this troubled demo was the total lack of wake words between each question. Limp grilled it like a 5-year-old when they see you have a Nintendo Switch and apart from Wi-Fi hiccups it sounded like a normal conversation.
While Amazon’s hardware boss talked over Alexa’s updated large language model (LLM) capabilities with local processing for faster requests at the Amazon hardware event, a picture displayed behind him showed something that looked similar to an Echo Hub, but a bit bigger.
If it’s a new device, we’ll probably find out more very soon.
That’s ... impressive.
Good in-home AI, Dave Limp tells us, is: conversational, lives in the real world and not a browser, is personalized just to you, has personality, and trustworthy. A pretty good list, actually.
Also, Limp proved his first point with an uncomfortable silence about the length of an Alexa delay, which was pretty great.
Shown today during Amazon’s hardware event, this will be a huge improvement. Personally, I’ve found smart displays are often slower than the standard Echo speakers.
The Echo Show 8 will have “spacial audio” and “room adaptation” software. That should make it behave sort of like Sonos speakers have for years.
The home screen will also change depending on your proximity to it. Changing content as you approach so its easier to interact with via touch, and then simplify when you step away.
It will be available starting next month, pre-orders start today and it will retail for $149.99
