Alexa Turns Eight: Highlights From the Moon to Matter

@alexa99

Let’s celebr8 my 8th birthday with a little medit8ion on the number 8️⃣! 🎂💙 #AmazonAlexa

♬ Storytelling – Adriel

Amazon Alexa officially turned eight on Nov. 6 and has a lot to show for a busy year, including a shift from YouTube to TikTok for its own celebratory video, as seen above. The voice assistant and its many outlets have spent the last year doing a lot of traveling, both literally and metaphorically, so we thought we’d highlight some of the most notable Alexa stories as the voice assistant prepares for another year around the Sun.

1. New Alexa Conversation Mode Skips Wake Word Repetition

   Amazon debuted Conversation Mode for Alexa to make interactions with the voice assistant feel more natural by cutting down on the need to repeat Alexa’s wake word.

2. NASA Will Take Alexa to Space and Maybe the Moon

   NASA announced it would send Alexa to the Moon as part of the upcoming Artemis missions

3. Auto Giant Stellantis Will Integrate Alexa-Powered Platform into Millions of Cars

   Automobile giant Stellantis announced it would deploy Alexa-powered connected vehicle technology to millions of its cars and even make the voice assistant part of its manufacturing process.

4. Alexa Will Now Tell You About Amazon Sales the Day Before and Prearrange Purchases Ahead of Time

   Alexa began encouraging voice commerce in a new way when it began giving users a heads up the day before items on their wishlist or in their cart go on sale and offered to proactively arrange to buy any of those items on behalf of the user once the sale starts.

5. Alexa Deepfakes Deceased Grandmother’s Voice to Read to a Child for Feature Preview

   Alexa previewed a future of custom Alexa voices by demonstrating how a child could have Alexa read a story to him in the voice of his grandmother, who had passed away.

6. Amazon Spends $1.7B for Roomba Developer iRobot to Grab Robot Vacuum Market Lead

   Amazon will pay $1.7 billion to acquire Roomba robot vacuum creator iRobot, completing the alignment between iRobot and Amazon’s smart home AI software and potentially boosting the Amazon Astro robot.

7. Alexa Will Start Answering Questions With Ads in 2023

   Amazon will incorporate ads into Alexa’s answers with its new Customers Ask Alexa feature so that companies will be able to essentially sponsor the voice assistant’s responses to questions relevant to their products, linking an advertisement for a cleaning spray to a query about how to remove stains, for instance.

8. Amazon Starts Supporting ‘Matter’ Smart Home Standard for Echo Devices

   Amazon began supporting the cross-company Matter standard for smart home devices and augmented the Works with Alexa program to encompass more than 100 million products next year.

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