Alexa makes life more convenient

Customers tell us that they love how Alexa makes things easier throughout their house. Alexa can help you get more done with new smart home features and enhancements to existing features like Alexa Routines. One of my favorites is Alexa Announcements, where I can call my kids to dinner with a broadcast message to all of the Echo devices in my household. We’ve also added the ability for customers to control more Alexa settings with just their voice. Sometimes Alexa Won't respond To Your Voice Commands

Customers are using Alexa millions of times each day to control their home, so of course we wanted to make your smart home even smarter. We introduced Frustration-Free Setup to make setting up a device as easy as plugging it in, and Hunches, so now Alexa can make suggestions like, “By the way, I see you left your porch lights on. Would you like me to turn them off?”

Alexa is more personal and conversational

In 2018 Alexa became even more personalized to you. Alexa can now help you remember important information like birthdays and anniversaries through a feature called Remember This. And using Alexa Skill Blueprints, customers can create their own personalized skills for Alexa through easy to use templates. We’ve heard customers are using Skill Blueprints to keep track of household chores, leave personalized instructions for their houseguests, and more.

Many of these features wouldn’t be possible without the power of AI and the AWS cloud. We have teams of people working hard to make Alexa more natural and conversational every day. In addition to improving the service's speech recognition and natural language understanding, we added Multi-step Requests, Follow-Up Mode, and Context Carryover to make interacting with Alexa even easier and more natural. And, we also made it easier for you to find and enable skills using more natural requests. But one of the coolest new features for me has to be Whisper Mode. Alexa can now detect if you are whispering to her and adapt her responses. That means, if you whisper your request to her, she'll whisper back. It's no surprise that we're hearing from new parents that they love this feature.

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