Still on the fence about which iPhone to buy, the 15 or 15 Plus the 15 Pro or 15 Pro Max? Can’t decide if it’s time to double-tap your way to a Watch upgrade? Wondering what the difference is between a homescreen widget and a lockscreen widget and whatever happens in the Dynamic Island and a Live Activity? Well, us too. So that’s all we did on The Vergecast today. We even figured some stuff out.
We’re seeing some genuinely useful-seeming things here! Multi-step routines you can create just by listing tasks for Alexa to accomplished; smart home controls that work no matter how you say the command.
It sounds great! But Amazon has been talking about how easy Alexa makes life for almost a decade now, and ... it doesn’t. At least, not nearly like Amazon’s Charlie French is describing right now. This is a lot of hype for this new LLM-based system to live up to.
“The fastest speeds Eero customers have ever experienced,” we’re told. Two 10GB ethernet ports, 9.4Gbps ethernet speed, and can handle more than 200 connected devices. It starts at $599.99 and comes in packs of one, two, or three. It’s also enormous. But it’s a heck of a router.
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!
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.
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!
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.”
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.
