Ten Years since Amazon launched its first device Kindle in the market. And now the company has launched its Echo and Alexa in the Indian market. Is there any future for them in India? Let’s find!
Right from the beginning, Alexa has almost 10,000 “skills” in the country. Skills are abilities that Alexa contains and additionally are always being included to it. The 7 microphone arrangement on any Echo gadget is adjusted to operate in acoustically challenged atmosphere. It factually directs the microphone towards the individual (a beam forming process) and eliminates all the ambient noise. The Echo gadgets themselves have in-built speakers for a high quality sound in addition to the understanding of natural language.
“Early on the expansion of Alexa and Echo, our latency was 6 Seconds or at the max 7 Seconds; and lowering that time was the solution to be capable of getting a feasible device. At present, the latency is almost just 2 Seconds, which is unbelievable as you have to recognize what all goes on in that period” claims SVP of Devices at Amazon, David Limp, to the media in an interview.
“Let us say you ask, “what’s the weather like?”. This sentence gets compacted, sent through the Wi-Fi network to the cloud of the company where the speech is uncompressed, understanding of natural language is implied (so that it understands what you are asking), then it sends for a real-time weather facility, the solution comes back, that data gets compacted, sent again to your device over the cloud where the text-to-speech engine activates and tells us the result out loud and clear.”
There has been also been discussions about privacy worries with Alexa and Echo. This year in August, Wired Magazine posted on a hack by Mark Barnes, the British security researcher. He managed to make an entry into an Echo to convert it into a wiretap gadget. Once compromised, the gadget might stream audio silently over to a distant server of his selection. The hack needed physical authorization to the Echo gadget, which was quite obvious due to the fact that wires plus and visible soldering was only valid to the first generation of Echo devices.
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