Amazon’s five new Alexa devices add cameras, sleep sensing, and smart-home features. Compare prices, Alexa+ requirements, compatibility, and privacy controls.
The post Amazon’s New Alexa Lineup: Five Devices, More Features, New Trade-Offs appeared first on TechRepublic.
Amazon’s five new Alexa devices add cameras, sleep sensing, and smart-home features. Compare prices, Alexa+ requirements, compatibility, and privacy controls.
The post Amazon’s New Alexa Lineup: Five Devices, More Features, New Trade-Offs appeared first on TechRepublic.
I'm not a huge fan of smart home dashboards; I want my smart home to work as automatically as possible. However, when I had an idea for building a retro game version of my house that I could use to control my smart home, I knew I had to make it happen.
I have a lot of appliance manuals that I've collected over the years. They rarely need looking at, but when they do, finding the right manual can be a chore. I decided to stick NFC tags to my appliances so that I could access their manuals more easily.
Since debuting in 2019, Amazon's Echo Studio targeted users who wanted superior audio quality from their Alexa-based smart speaker. The latest Echo Studio adds another less-expected differentiator: an integrated camera.
The Echo Studio with Home Camera, released alongside a pile of other Alexa devices today, doesn’t have many audio upgrades over the standard Echo Studio. Each speaker has one 3.75-inch high-excursion woofer and three full-range drivers. They both support Dolby Atmos and Amazon’s proprietary algorithm for adding a surround sound-like effect to stereo audio. Per the devices’ product pages, the speakers have lossless HD audio, Advanced Room Adaptation, and features for fighting noise distortion. Amazon announced the Advanced Room Adaptaion today, saying that the feature “continuously tunes the sound to your space, automatically adapting to the room's acoustics.”
Both speakers have four-microphone arrays and the same AZ3 Pro processor that Amazon introduced a year ago. The processor has an AI accelerator for using Amazon's Alexa+ generative AI chatbot.
© Amazon
Hot on the heels of Apple’s HomeView launch, Amazon has unveiled a massive 16-inch Echo Show and updated the Echo Studio with a built-in camera. Both devices are worth your attention as they aim to make Alexa more useful around the home, whether you want to manage connected gadgets, monitor your living room, or keep your daily schedule organized. The new Echo Studio and Echo Show lean on the latest Alexa with natural conversations and the ability to handle complex, multistep requests.
Motion sensors are popular smart home devices. They're relatively cheap and simple to set up, but often people only use them for basic automations such as turning on the lights when you walk into a room. With the right automations, there's a lot more you can do using motion sensors.
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