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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
David Limp’s on stage preparing to announce a whole lot of hardware. There’s the stuff we’re expecting, like a new Echo and Fire TV, and maybe even Alexa powered by generative AI. We’ll see what else gets announced.
This followed an opening video showing off, naturally, the power of Alexa, and David’s own reminder that he’s moving on from Amazon.
On September 6 Amazon said it was monitoring the use of generative AI by users of its Kindle Direct Publishing platform. Then Amazon announced an updated policy on the Kindle Direct Publishing forum Monday:
While we have not seen a spike in our publishing numbers, in order to help protect against abuse, we are lowering the volume limits we have in place on new title creations.
You can only self-publish three books a day. Amazon claims this will only affect a very small number of authors. If you are publishing that many books a day sans generative AI how is your brain not tired? That’s so much writing and I’m deeply impressed.
[www.kdpcommunity.com]
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