Amazon Alexa Now Supports Low-Powered Home Gadgets

Amazon is giving some good news to third-party developers. The tech giant has decided to extend Alexa voice control capabilities to low-powered devices. At present, the Alexa Voice Service or AVS requires a minimum of 100MB of on-device RAM. It also needs an ARM Cortex 'A' class microprocessor. Now, the company will extend it to low-end devices.

Amazon Alexa Extended

Now, Amazon is allowing Alexa into devices that are at the elementary level like the low-powered chips with 1MB RAM and so on. What this means is Alexa can be extended to more devices like switches, single-use devices, light bulbs, and more that pack low specifications. The devices will require simple computational power that can detect the wake word 'Alexa' and start the functionality.

According to AWS IoT VP Dirk Didascalou's statement to the Tech Crunch, Amazon can "now offload the vast majority of all of this to the cloud. So the device can be ultra dumb. The only thing that the device still needs to do is wake word detection." He further adds that low-powered processors from Qualcomm and others can reduce the electricity bill by 50 percent.

Moreover, Amazon is planning to transfer tasks like processing requests, buffering, decoding, retrieving, and more to the cloud. The company believes this will help to reduce expenditure bills. This would mean light switches and other such home appliances can be accessed with voice controls and maybe with biometrics.

Amazon Alexa For IoT

There's more for IoT developers. Amazon is working on introducing connectivity and control services for such developers. Plus, AWS customers can also create their own machine learning image analysis. This comes from the new feature added called Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels, which will be available from December 3.

Besides, Amazon is also introducing Fleet Provisioning for AWS IoT Core. What it does is makes life simpler for those using a wide range of connected devices. This might be anything from smart vacuum cleaners to something as huge as construction excavators.