Practical with Alexa Plus in the smart home

Oh, Alexa, how you changed. The long -awaited new Alexa, Alexa Plus, will bring your smart home a conversational, context -conscious and capable assistant. With a new voice (indeed eight of them) and a new attitude, this is the greatest change in the voice assistant since his debut in 2014. And everything sounds very impressive.

Alexa Plus was announced this week at a press conference in New York City and offers several new skills for generative AI-driven skills to help you manage your life and some important smart home upgrades. I was at the event and saw several staged demos of the new functions, but also had to try out some of the Smart Home improvements.

The biggest change is how Alexa can react to natural language. The demo showed that they can speak to him and say what they want instead of remembering certain commands. I saw the new Alexa commands understood and explained: “Bring the lights here and put them on a warm glow.” The GE Cync -Smart glow bulb and light stripes reacted in the room, although the request did not contain any space or specific names for each device.

When Alexa was instructed to “switch on the lamp in the seating area”, this apparently meant that the lamp with the name “sofa lamp” was to “serve”. This should no longer mean certain devices that make it easier for everyone in the home to control devices with their voice.

I was also able to speak to the assistant myself and try out his new ability to follow several commands at the same time without repeating Wake Word, Alexa. I asked the lights to darken and “make it a little warmer”. The thermostat was discontinued while the lights have dimmed. Alexa said: “I dimmed the lights in the living room and increased the temperature by two degrees. Is there anything else you need? “Then I said:” Can you vacuum the ground? “It replied” Okay “and the Roomba started a job.

Another new function that I tried was the possibility to set up a Smart Home routine with the use of Voice. I said Alexa that I recently had problems waking up, and after a few back and forth routine it created a “good morning” that set an alarm to wake me up to Taylor Swift's “Shake it off” and adapt the intelligent lights in my room.

This is pretty easy because not many devices were connected to the show. Amazon, however, says that Alexa, with the kind approval of his knowledge, is able to create more complex routines by voice. This should make it easier for people to do more with their networked devices and not spend time to program an app.

The other exciting upgrade is the new Echo show user interface. This starts on 15 and 21, but Scott Durham from Amazon told me that 8 and 10 will eventually come on the show. With a clean, slimmer full-screen user interface with larger widgets that use the screen size (I have seen it on the 21-inch screen), it is now more customizable and feels more like a tablet surface than an intelligent display. During the demo it seemed to move smoothly and quickly with limited delay.

The user interface now has a much larger calendar and smart home widgets. A practical new function is the possibility to send images, documents and notes to your e -mail address from alexa@alexa.com or via the Alexa -app or the new web interface. From there, Amazon says that it analyzes things like events and add to your calendar and you can ask questions about the information. Apparently it can even decrypt all information in this lengthy school email and determine memories to tell you what you have to send on what days.

The Smart Home Control user interface was canceled by the award -winning interface on the Echo hub, which gives you a simple touch control for devices in your home if you do not want to use a voice or a smartphone. And if you take full screen mode, it is now much easier to switch between rooms and devices. Alexa's map view is also there and it looks great on the big screen.

With a new ring camera integration function, you can specify Alexa Plus Query Rings intelligent video search to show you summaries of events that have taken place in your house, or certain instances such as “Coming is a package?” or “did someone let out the dog?”

Another big improvement with Alexa Plus is new cooking checks. The following recipes in an Echo show can currently be playful and frustrating. With Alexa Plus, the assistant becomes proactive. It can now be removed from the recipes and add to a shopping list, use natural language to add additional items, and prompt them to have them delivered to them (with Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh as well as “Several other food providers”).

Alexa can also create recipes based on ingredients that you tell him that you have at hand and suggest that you are exposed to when you are exposed. The kitchen is one of the most useful places for the hands -free system, and if this works well, I can see that it is very helpful. I am very happy about the new timer function, which takes all time-based steps in the recipe. B. slide for two minutes or for 35 minutes at 350 degrees and set them automatically so that they start when they are ready.

Aaron Rubenson from Amazon told me that thanks to Alexa's improved natural language skills, it is better off with intelligent kitchen appliances. Instead of using a specific nomenclature to pre -heat my thermador oven, it should react to a command that implies that I want to stay my oven. For example: “Alexa, can you put the oven on the right temperature for this recipe?”

I have used Alexa for almost a decade and while it has used it, it never felt indispensable. This is mainly due to how difficult it is to speak correctly. I had to learn Alexa-Speak to make it reliable, which often makes it more frustrating than useful. If the new Alexa can also work in my house as in the demos that I saw this week, this will be a big change in home automation.