Alexa on batteries: A life-changing door just opened
September 25, 2017
The day before the Alexa Smart Glasses was announced, Amazon released details of a Fire Tablet upgrade, with one of the key features being a way to make Alexa Handsfree.
Several hundred articles have been written about Amazon’s new moves into Smart Glasses with the Alexa assistant. And it’s not just TechCrunch, Gizmodo, The Verge, Engadget, and all the consumer tech pubs doing the writing. It’s also places like but CNBC, USA Today, Fox News, Forbes, and many others.
I’ve read a dozen or more and they all say similar things about Amazon (difficulties in phone hardware), Google (failure in Glass), bone conduction mics, mobility for Alexa, strategy to get Alexa Everywhere, etc. But something big got lost in the shuffle.
Here’s your clue—the day before the Alexa Smart Glasses was announced, Amazon released details of a Fire Tablet upgrade, with one of the key features being a way to make Alexa Handsfree. That’s right, in both the glasses and the Fire Tablet, we have Alexa implementations running on batteries.
This is a REALLY big deal! This means that Amazon has already caught up to Google in being able to implement low-power devices with its handsfree Alexa Assistant. Is this important? Yes, it is. It may be the most important battle to be waged in the Assistant wars. This is because the assistant we want is the invisible assistant that’s embedded into our bodies and our clothing. This assistant would be so small that it enables a seamless experience to augment our intelligence and capabilities without anyone even knowing. This assistant has to be low power, and handsfree Alexa is now enabled in extremely power sensitive modes. Kudos to Amazon!
Todd Mozer is the CEO of Sensory. He holds over a dozen patents in speech technology and has been involved in previous startups that reached IPO or were acquired by public companies. Todd holds an MBA from Stanford University, and has technical experience in machine learning, semiconductors, speech recognition, computer vision, and embedded software.
