36 Facts About Amazon Alexa

Amazon Alexa, known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013.

In September 2019, Amazon Alexa launched many new devices achieving many records while competing with the world's smart home industry.

Amazon Alexa was inspired by the computer voice and conversational system on board the Starship Enterprise in science fiction TV series and movies, beginning with Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation.

In June 2015, Amazon announced the Alexa Fund, a program that would invest in companies making voice control skills and technologies.

In 2016, the Amazon Alexa Prize was announced to further advance the technology.

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In January 2017, the first Amazon Alexa Conference took place in Nashville, Tennessee, an independent gathering of the worldwide community of Amazon Alexa developers and enthusiasts.

In May 2018, Amazon announced it would include Alexa in 35,000 new homes built by Lennar.

In November 2018, Amazon opened its first Alexa-themed pop-up shop inside of Toronto's Eaton Centre, showcasing the use of home automation products with Amazon's smart speakers.

In December 2018, Amazon Alexa was built into the Anki Vector, And was the first major update for the Anki Vector, although Vector was released in August 2018, he is the only home robot with advanced technology.

In October 2019, Amazon announced the expansion of Alexa to Brazil, in Portuguese, together with Bose, Intelbras, and LG.

The app can be used by owners of Amazon Alexa-enabled devices to install skills, control music, manage alarms, and view shopping lists.

Amazon Alexa can perform a number of preset functions out-of-the-box such as set timers, share the current weather, create lists, access Wikipedia articles, and many more things.

Amazon Alexa listens for the command and performs the appropriate function, or skill, to answer a question or command.

In 2018, Amazon rolled out a new "Brief Mode", wherein Alexa would begin responding with a beep sound rather than saying, "Okay", to confirm receipt of a command.

On December 20,2018, Amazon announced a new integration with the Wolfram Alpha answer engine, which provides enhanced accuracy for users asking questions of Alexa related to math, science, astronomy, engineering, geography, history, and more.

In September 2018, Amazon Alexa announced a microwave oven that can be paired and controlled with an Echo device.

However, some of these music services are not available on other Amazon Alexa-enabled products that are manufactured by companies external of its services.

Amazon Alexa allows the user to hear updates on supported sports teams.

Households with more than one member, one's Amazon Alexa contacts are pooled across all of the devices that are registered to its associated account.

Amazon Alexa for Business is a paid subscription service allowing companies to use Amazon Alexa to join conference calls, schedule meeting rooms, and custom skills designed by 3rd-party vendors.

In February 2019, Amazon further expanded the capability of Blueprints by allowing customers to publish skills they've built with the templates to its Alexa Skill Store in the US for use by anyone with an Alexa-enabled device.

Products built using AVS have access to Amazon Alexa's growing list of capabilities including all of the Amazon Alexa Skills.

Voice of Amazon Alexa is generated by a long short-term memory artificial neural network.

In 2019, Amazon Alexa started replying to Spanish voice commands in Spanish.

Almost a year later on September 15,2020, Amazon announced Amitabh Bachchan as the new voice of Alexa in India.

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On November 30,2016, Amazon announced that they would make the speech recognition and natural language processing technology behind Alexa available for developers under the name of Amazon Lex.

Amazon Alexa responds to these concerns by stating that the devices only stream recordings from the user's home when the 'wake word' activates the device.

Amazon Alexa uses past voice recordings sent to the cloud service to improve responses to future questions.

Amazon Alexa uses an address stored in the companion app when it needs a location.

For example, Amazon Alexa uses the user's location to respond to requests for nearby restaurants or stores.

Amazon Alexa retains digital recordings of users' audio spoken after the "wake word", and while the audio recordings are subject to demands by law enforcement, government agents, and other entities via subpoena, Amazon Alexa publishes some information about the warrants, subpoenas and warrant-less demands it receives.

In November 2018, Amazon Alexa sent 1700 recordings of an American couple to an unrelated European man.

Amazon Alexa blamed the incident on "human error" and called it an "isolated single case".

Amazon Alexa dismissed the incident as an "extremely rare occurrence" and claimed the device "interpreted background conversation" as a sequence of commands to turn on, record, send the recording, and select a specific recipient.

Amazon Alexa has been known to listen in on private conversations and store personal information which was hacked and sent to the hacker.

Besides financial support, Amazon Alexa provides business and technology expertise, help for bringing products to the market, aid for hard- and software development as well as enhanced marketing support on proprietary Amazon Alexa platforms.