Amazon Alexa

What is Amazon Alexa?

Many of us would have effectively known about Amazon’s latest gadget, the Amazon Alexa, depicted as one of the geekiest and revolutionary home appliances. Alexa has numerous jobs: personal assistant, butler, playmate, and parents’ helper—but what exactly is Alexa? It’s a hands-free voice service by Amazon—Alexa responds to your voice to assist you with getting things done.

Alexa follows your voice commands to diminish the lights, turn up the indoor regulator, set a timer, turn on the TV, or make a shopping list (and that is only a glimpse of something larger!).

Alexa is continually learning. Since Alexa works in the cloud, it’s constantly adding new abilities and schedules. The more you use Alexa, the better it gets—Alexa learns your speech patterns and adapts to your personal preferences.

How does Amazon Alexa work?

Alexa utilizes an online service run by Amazon to interpret your verbal orders. It sounds not very easy; however, you don’t need to understand the tech behind Alexa to make it work for you.

Purchasing an Amazon Echo is the simplest method to get Alexa. To get Alexa’s attention, you say the wake word: “Alexa.” You can also set it to “Echo,” “Computer,” or “Amazon.”

After waking, the Echo records all that you say and sends it to Alexa Voice Services, where artificial intelligence processes your request and carries it out. It’s a great deal of work; however, Alexa is quick to such an extent that you will not even notice.

In addition to essential requests, Alexa likewise works with a huge number of different technologies in your home, vehicle, and beyond so you can use Alexa for everything from beginning a pot of coffee to requesting a Uber.

Pros and Cons of Amazon Alexa

Pros:

• Answers questions, reads audiobooks and the news, reports traffic and climate, gives data on nearby businesses, gives sports scores and schedules, utilizing the Alexa Voice Service.
• Ability to control lights, switches, and thermostats.
• Constantly getting smarter and adding new features and abilities – more than 100 have been added since launch.
• Hears you from across the room with far-field voice recognition, even while music is playing.
• Allows hands-free convenience with voice control.
• Plays all your music from Prime Music, Spotify, etc.
• The Alexa accompanies the optional remote controller to control the volume or speak commands. It works well from a decent distance at 20-30 ft. You can get the remote control.
• Great tool for disabled people, for example, making doctor appointments, telling the time, inputting schedules, making phone calls, and getting the climate report.
• Voice training feature permits Amazon Alexa to easily recognize different voices specific to each of your family members. The voice recognition system is unbelievably quick, accurate, and responsive.
• The Bluetooth matching is flawless – say “Alexa pair Bluetooth,” and you’ll be connected in 30 seconds.
• The Amazon Alexa finds and plays your favorite music, although you may need to set up your playlists with some additional setup.
• The shopping list function you to add stuff to your shopping list on the go.
• Amazon Alexa allows you to start and stop timers and alarms. Just say “Alexa set alarm for 7:30 am” or “Alexa set a timer for 15 minutes”. This function is especially useful when cooking in the kitchen when you need to juggle the kids simultaneously.
• You can pause, stop, skip and start music with your voice, and it works well. You can also control the volume with your voice.
• Alexa is generally excellent at factual questions, for example, “How heavy is one teaspoon of sugar?” or “How much does an elephant weight,” and it will convey the appropriate response in seconds. It can also do the math.
• Alexa tells jokes, although some of them aren’t very good.
• No monthly costs or subscription costs.

Cons:

• Amazon Alexa doesn’t have any display to show visual pictures (like maps or web searches). It would help if you depended totally on its audio outputs.
• Alexa only speaks a few languages.
• The Alexa isn’t portable, and you need to keep it plugged inconsistently. It doesn’t have batteries, which means you cannot take it outside of your home. The moment you unplug it from the wall, it turns off.
• The Alexa can only answer factual questions – basically, the stuff you can discover on the heading of a Wikipedia page or with Google answers. It can’t respond to questions, such as, “What is a suitable substitute for chicken?” or “How can I train my dog to be smarter?”
• Might need to spend money on wall switches, bulbs, smoke detectors, cameras to automate your home with Amazon Alexa.
• The Alexa can’t respond to complicated commands or form an opinion; Alexa is a far cry from the perfect personal assistant.
• Unable to do multiple tasks all at once without repeating its name “Alexa.” You can’t have multiple instructions in a single sentence.
• The sound performance of the Amazon Alexa is good but not impressive.
• Audio from Amazon Alexa can’t be sent to various Bluetooth speakers or headphones.