Personal Assistants are becoming a fairly common occurrence. Apple’s Siri isn’t the only smart phone-gal you can interact with. Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa are mostly on par with Siri these days. While AI based personal assistants have still got ways to go, they have improved exponentially in the past 12-15 months or so.
Amazon has been trying to integrate Alexa into our home eco-system, with constant updates and multi-device support. The latest one of these updates is aimed at enabling longer duration conversations with the assistance with relative ease. Alexa will now stay awake for 5 seconds after you issue a command.
Now, you won’t have to call her name out, after every command. Alexa’s blue light will stay on till she’s awake to let the user know if she needs to be called out or the command can be issued directly.
There is one problem that might render this function less effective. As per Amazon, Alexa will try to differentiate the user request and background noise, so there’s a chance that she might not detect your request or discard it depending on the voice clarity.
This news was first reported by CNET. The new feature, Follow-Up mode, is designed to make conversations with your Alexa device feel more natural and convenient. Follow-Up mode is available on all hands-free Alexa-enabled devices, like the Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Spot.
It’ll be interesting to see how well this works. But, we’re confident that even if there are hitches, Amazon will be quick to come up with a fix given their dedication to Alexa.
And that is no biggie. Amazon’s Echo Dot was the top-selling Amazon device at the last quarter of 2017. If you have an Alexa enabled device, do let us know how you feel about the PA.