1. Amazon’s voice AI, Alexa, can be used to help with a variety of tasks.
Android is a mobile operating system that runs on a vast array of hardware, from smartphones and tablets to game consoles and smartwatches. While Android has been the basis for many devices, it’s also been a platform choice for the likes of Amazon, Samsung, Microsoft and Sony. You can say the same of iOS, Windows Phone and BlackBerry: The iPhone was one of the first platforms to gain momentum, but Apple has since gone on to dominate in both form and function.
While there are differences in how each version of Android has been developed (and as you might expect differences between mobile operating systems based on different hardware), one thing that’s always been common: There’s no doubt that they all run on Google services. Just as Apple doesn’t make an operating system without iOS or Windows Phone without Windows Phone (or BlackBerry without its proprietary operating system), Google doesn’t make an Android OS without Google Play Services (aka Google Chrome OS). As such, all Android devices have access to common services.
Related Posts:
Like iOS, Android apps can access data stored in the cloud — including photos and videos — but unlike iOS there is no significant difference between them: There’s no difference between a paid app from a smartphone manufacturer like Samsung or HTC versus an app from Foursquare or Facebook (though there are some differences between each).
Android apps have access to data stored in the cloud too — including photos and videos — but unlike iOS there is no significant difference between them: There’s no difference between a paid app from a smartphone manufacturer like Samsung or HTC versus an app from Foursquare or Facebook (though there are some differences between each).
2. What can Alexa do?
Alexa is the voice AI of Amazon. It lives in the cloud and can be found on any device that can connect to the cloud. It’s always listening, independent and self-aware. Alexa is a “smart speaker“, but this doesn’t mean it’s just a speaker, it speaks back (via text/voice) and is capable of more advanced tasks (like pointing out nearby restaurants).
Alexa also has a few tricks up its sleeve:
• • • • • • Learning languages (and accents) Amazon Prime Shopping Alexa skills — Skills are all pre-programmed features that are built into Alexa that you can use or have someone else use for you. These skills include the ability to shop, play music, control smart home gadgets like lights and thermostats, ask questions about weather, manage your calendar, book flights with flightspotter , ask questions about sports scores and games (like who won what game last night), take pictures with the SIRI camera or have people take pictures with you.
Alexa Skills are great for people who want to get involved with Alexa without having to learn coding or APIs. If you’re interested in getting started building Alexa Skills for yourself make sure to check out our online training course called “Building Your First Alexa Skill”. Once you’ve built your first skill stop by our forums to share your thoughts on how it works!
Alexa has become much more than just a voice assistant; she now has fully-featured search capabilities. Just say “Hey Alexa” followed by a word or phrase and she’ll return results based on what she knows about that term: “what’s ‘love’?” followed by “love” will return results related to “love”, while “how many words can I say before I get banned?” will return results related to words starting with “how”.
Alexa has also begun interacting with other devices outside of Amazon’s devices — like smart TVs.* While most media players prefer to keep their user interface hidden from view due to the demands of the codecs they use, we’ve found that users love having their favorite songs play from Spotify on their TV speakers. So we’re working hard on making this happen! *We’re still working around technical limitations but we expect this feature next year 🙂
3. Using the Alexa app
For those of us who have been using Amazon Echo devices for a long time, it’s easy to forget that Alexa is still a fairly new feature. But what alexa can do is impressive. It can connect with your phone, and even control your lights. So how do you use the Alexa app?
To start with, you can ask Alexa anything, ranging from your favorite movie to the weather and traffic reports. You can also ask commands like “Alexa, play music” and “Alexa, turn on the lights.”
The app is available on both Android and iOS devices (with some slight interface differences) with voice-activated access in English and Spanish.
4. Alexa features
Amazon’s Alexa is a digital helper that lives in the cloud. Starting today, you can ask Alexa to do anything from play your music to check the weather forecast. If you’ve got a device that connects to Alexa, the Echo and Echo Dot are compatible with Alexa: they’re just like any other device you’ve got.
Echo devices are easy to set up, and once you’ve done it, you can use them to chat with Alexa — just like any other voice-activated device.
The Echo Dot is perfect for one person who wants a hands-free assistant but doesn’t need as much power or processing power as an Echo speaker. The Dot is also great for kids and elderly people who want something small and portable that can be used anywhere with internet access. You’ll hear updates about the weather, news and traffic on your schedule; if you’re out driving or simply out of sight, Amazon has already added location services so that you’ll know where your Echo is even when no internet connection is available.
The Best Features of Alexa
Alexa brings all this intelligence into your home by listening for spoken commands in several languages (including English) and responding with funny responses based on what you say (you don’t have to say “Alexa” — just say “hey” or “hey there”!). But even without being able to respond verbally, there are some clever things Alexa can do by listening for certain patterns in your voice: stream music based on what song title or artist is playing; turn on lights based on what word comes up in the wake word; locate locations near you using a map; read aloud long passages from newspapers or magazines; show movie trailers from Netflix or HBO Go based on time left in a movie; tell the time by saying “time”; tell your smart home devices what room temperature it’s currently at; communicate with Amazon’s Fire TV Stick enabled devices through AirPlay streaming using the same voice command setting; play music automatically at specific times.
You’ll also be able to ask Alexa to send messages back and forth between two people, set reminders, change timers or alarms, control connected home devices like lights and locks via voice commands (using wake words), open apps without touching a screen (using “Where’s my phone?”), play podcasts by saying “Hey Siri”, turn down lights when someone calls using “ring” (and optionally showing an LED notification), turn up lights when someone calls using “bright” (and optionally
5. Tips for using Alexa
Alexa is a very capable tool. She was created by the same people who created Siri, and there is some overlap in terms of what she can do, but Alexa differs in a couple of key ways:
Alexa can “ask” questions and perform basic tasks. (Technically asking questions should be possible if Alexa has an understanding of English language, but I don’t think it’s that useful.)
Alexa can find contacts, music, videos and other content from the internet.
Alexa can read books and articles using text-to-speech — but only for the book that you have purchased alongside it. If you are listening to audio books or listening to audiobooks using a podcast player, Alexa cannot read them for you. With an exception: if you are listening to audio books produced by Apple or other companies (or their audiobooks), Alexa will read them for you.
Alexa can play music from Spotify and other apps on your phone or computer. This includes looking up/playing songs on your own device (such as playing music on your own device) as well as playing songs that are available in Spotify’s library available on Android devices (such as playing music on Android devices). However, if you’re listening to an app like Spotify Connect or Pandora Radio connected to Spotify via Bluetooth or AirPlay , then Alexa cannot play that app’s music for you because it requires access to the apps’ servers. If your device runs Android 4.4 or later, then Alexa may also play Pandora’s radio station for you; however this functionality is not yet built into Google Play Music™ nor any of Google Play’s other apps; so starting with those (Google Play Music™ and Google Play™) apps would be most helpful here.)
Finally, Alexa offers many features not found with Siri such as predictive search via voice recognition (“PLAY THIS SONG”.), ability to listen to songs at different volumes and even recognize album art from pictures in photos (like artist artwork found in iTunes purchases). However, all of these features require access to Amazon’s cloud services — which means they require a physical device that is connected to Amazon’s cloud service(s) (and may require additional services like Amazon Prime). Additionally, many of these features are not available on iOS devices at all; though Siri does offer these same features over iOS devices when supported by Apple’s operating system. This means that users running iOS 5 or later have little reason to use Siri instead of using Alexa.
6. Best Amazon Echo commands
To understand what Alexa can do and how she can help you, you need to understand that her language is optimized for natural speech. That means that your voice will sound different to the way it normally sounds (it’s a little like speaking gibberish into a pinhole) but it will sound natural to Alexa.
We have a number of different commands Alexa has available, some (like “Alexa, play Game of Thrones)” are designed for specific devices, but most are generic enough to work with almost any Echo or Dot.
The commands are organised in three categories:
• General commands such as “Alexa, ask the weather”
• Suggested Commands
• New Commands
This is an overview of the most useful commands we have available:
I’m sorry I’m not good at cooking. Can I please buy you dinner? What’s going on? I need your help with something. Are you okay? Can I get you anything? How about a glass of water? Let’s see what we can do about this. Let’s go for a walk. (You can also send your own custom commands.)
Your turn! Writing them out in this format gives us lots more options and makes them easier to remember by sending them over text message or email when they would be more convenient than speaking them out loud (or writing them on paper).
We hope these will help you get the most out of your Echo and improve your day-to-day life by helping you remember things like:
7. Amazon Alexa and the smart home
Alexa is a virtual personal assistant, voice assistant, and cloud-based service. Amazon Alexa was built by the world’s leading voice technology companies, including Amazon.com Inc., Bose Corporation, Cisco Systems, Nuance Communications Corporation, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. and Toshiba Corporation. The service allows users to perform tasks like playing music and controlling lights and TVs with natural language commands.
Alexa is available on a wide variety of devices such as Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Show, Amazon Tap, Fire TV Stick and Fire TV; as well as smartphones via the Alexa app for iOS and Android devices and through the web browser everywhere else you are able to access the internet.
The Alexa Voice Service provides natural language voice control for devices that support it without requiring any special skills or knowledge of specific languages (such as English). This includes a wide range of devices including:
• Smart Home Devices – From light bulbs to thermostats
• Home Audio Systems – From in-wall speakers to wireless speakers
• Mobile Devices – From smartphones to tablets
8. Alexa shopping commands
Shopping is one of the most important components of your product. Amazon is a huge online retailer, with potentially millions of products to choose from. If you want to be successful, you need to do your research and learn what people will want to buy.
To do this, you’ll first need to know what people search for on Amazon. This is determined by the way people are searching for products across all platforms such as iOS, Android and Web searches. There are two general ways:
• You can create keyword lists (or “keyword vectors”) that identify the keywords that people use when shopping on Amazon. For example, if someone has searched for a particular product on Google or Bing, their search query would be matched with a list of keywords that match these terms in Amazon search results. This approach yields an output of several thousand keywords (worth about $5 per keyword).
• You can use Amazon recommendation algorithms to recommend relevant items based on these queries – this takes into account things like the popularity of certain types of products and related categories, as well as paying more attention to which keywords appear most frequently in various searches within certain categories.
The first approach relies heavily on standardised data sources: Google and Bing are good places to start looking at terms and phrases that are common in searches. The second approach is more labour-intensive but yields more meaningful results: it’s worth doing this exercise yourself so you get a feel for how others might find your product or service – especially if you expect it not only to be popular but also valuable (something we encourage).
9. Enable Alexa Whisper mode
Alexa has a lot of capabilities, but one that many users probably aren’t familiar with is Whisper mode, which allows you to type what you want Alexa to do and then ask her to do it. It’s a great way to get quick answers without having to hold your phone up to your ear.
Whisper mode is pretty much the best way of getting quick answers from Alexa; but it’s also the most difficult way. To get Whisper mode on your phone:
1) Enable the feature (turn on the device in Settings)
2) Type “whisper” into https://alexa.amazon.com/voicecommands/words/whisper
3) The results are listed in https://alexa.amazon.com/voicecommands/results_suggestions
This is incredibly useful for things like setting alarms or calendar reminders; however, not every command will show up here and some commands might not be available at all — for example, there are no commands for “showering” or “running errands”. You can see a list of available commands by typing “help” or “?”, then type your command in the search field (whichever you typed in originally).
To see what commands Whisper mode supports, you can use this command: https://alexa.amazon.com/voicecommands/#enable-whisper/. You can also see a list of supported commands by going into Settings / Voice / Alexa Voice Skill / Whisper Commands / Command List / Alexa Commands . This will give you an idea of which commands work where within Whisper mode and which ones don’t work out as well within Amazon’s own system as they might elsewhere (that is, when trying them out yourself).
10. Video call using Skype on Echo Show
This post is in response to the question “What can Alexa do?”. Here are some of the things that Alexa could do, and why you might want to use her instead.
Alexa: You can ask Alexa what’s on TV, or “Alexa, what’s on in the news?” or “What’s on CNN?” or “What’s your favorite show?”
Echo Show: You can send a video call using Skype on Echo Show. If you have Skype set up for your device, you can call up people from your phone. (Skype does not work with Amazon echo devices; we don’t support this.)
FaceTime: You can use FaceTime for video calls over cellular data. Make sure you’re connected to Wi-Fi so that FaceTime will work, and make sure you have an internet connection before starting a FaceTime call. FaceTime requires an active data connection to work with newer iPhones and iPads. See this article for more information about Wi-Fi requirements (which is somewhat different than cellular data requirements).
Voice Control: You can ask Alexa to play music, change settings, turn off lights and lock your door—that’s voice control!
If there are any problems with this post or any other content on TechCrunch, please let us know via email at contact@techcrunch.com . We’ll update it as needed so we’re constantly aware of new ways Alexa could help you.
11. Set reminders with Alexa
What can Alexa do? Well, there are a thousand things that Alexa can do, but here we’ll focus on just a few of them. A lot of the things that Alexa does are very simple, but then again, we’re talking about Amazon here.
There are two main ways of entering into a command-and-control relationship with Alexa: command-line interface or voice commands. Command-line interface is the more common way to work with Alexa as it requires you to have an external device (usually smartphone) to use it. But be aware that Alexa is not accessible without an internet connection or the device in hand. Voice commands require an internet connection or the device in your hand and are accessible through any speaker or microphone to which you have access. Voice commands are also slightly more expensive than command line interface (but then again so too is Amazon). The simplicity of voice commands can make them useful for everyday tasks where you know exactly what you want done and you don’t need to know any technical terms (“Alexa , play some music”).
You can also get Alexa to do all sorts of other things like play music, turn on your lights, read you a bedtime story and even turn on your heating/air conditioning (if it’s set for ‘room temperature’ within the home).
The following examples will help you get started with the most common tasks:
• Play some music: Say “Alexa , play some music” and wait for her response (“Okay.”)
• Turn on lights: Say “Alexa , turn on my lights” and wait for her response (“Okay.”)
• Read me a bedtime story: Say “Alexa , read me a bedtime story”. Wait for her response (“Okay.”)
• Turn off my heating/AC: Say “Alexa , turn my heating/AC off.” Wait for her response (“Okay.”)
For something like this, I would recommend using voice commands over command line interface simply because there isn’t much difference between them – generally speaking it should be easier to use voice commands than command line interface. That said, if you’re putting together a list of simple commands (like turning off your lights), I would recommend using command line interface because it’s likely that people will assume if you haven’t already set up an account with Alexa then you probably don’t have voice command capabilities built in! But if you have created a new account from scratch then both options
12. Clear your Alexa history
Alexa is a powerful tool and we love it here at AudioHive. While Alexa is a great tool, it’s not perfect (and for good reason) and it can be used for all sorts of things that aren’t helpful or are downright scary. We’ve found that if you want Audible to be accessible to people outside your own organization, you need to clear your Alexa history.
If you do so before you use Alexa, she will ask her questions with the words from those places in mind, and that helps get the content out there where people outside your organization can find the information they want. In short, clearing your history helps make Audible more accessible to people outside of your organization.
Conclusion: There are many things that Alexa can do to help make your life easier.
In the last decade, there have been a few breakthroughs in AI. Some of these have made us more aware of the world around us, while others have changed how we use technology to interact with it.
Alexa is one of those breakthroughs: a voice-activated digital assistant (made by Amazon) that lives in the cloud and can do almost anything you need it to do from your computer or smartphone.
Alexa is built on deep learning algorithms, which are basically automated processes for recognizing and classifying objects. Alexa understands natural language and understands simple commands like “set the alarm on” or “turn on the lights” with almost no training data needed.
Alexa is able to understand human language and recognize simple concepts like “on” or “off”. It’s just one step away from understanding spoken language and interacting with that as well.
The best part is that Alexa learns over time what you want to say so you don’t need to repeat yourself every time…you can use her to talk about anything at all! And shows you interesting things along the way!