Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Amazon Alexa News

Amazon's Echo line of devices gets a new feature in
the form of "follow-up" mode, which lets users spit out
command after command without repeating the wake
word each time. Alexa won't nest one request into
another, but it will accommodate multiple requests back
to back.’

That means it's still not possible to perform two commands
in the same sentence. So, users can't say something like,
"Alexa, dim the lights and search for romantic comedies on
Netflix." They still have to divide those into two, but now
without needing to say "Alexa" each time.

The new feature works because Alexa now continues to
listen five seconds after a command, indicated by the blue
ring on the hardware staying lit. Once that fades, it means
Alexa has returned to sleep mode and will only be accessed
again via the wake word.

There are potential problems here, though. There's the
fact that for it to determine a command is indeed a follow-
up, Alexa must first be "confident" that the second
command isn't just background noise from people
chattering or a dialog from a TV program.

Amazon didn't provide a lot of details on how Alexa
determines follow-up commands, but there's reason to
believe this won't work 100 percent of the time initially.
After all, until they received an update, Echo units were
shown to be prone to following commands from the TV.
Interestingly, Amazon says that users can now
deliberately prevent Alexa from listening to commands

by saying "stop" or "thank you."

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