ByIANSlife Features

September 26, 2019 (IANSlife) In a bid to add a little more Alexa to your daily life, both at home and on the go, Amazon Devices has rolled out a whole new range of Echo Smart Home speakers and upgrades, right in time for the festival season. 

The Smart Home range has been launched keeping in mind — consumer needs and demands, working backwards process, and most importantly, privacy. And the enhancements can be seen across devices, more specifically Echo, Fire TV, Ring and associated products. 

 

While in the United States, the new line-up gives plenty of options to chose from, in India, it offers customers:

• All-new Echo: Featuring an updated fabric design and premium sound, for the same price as previous generation Echo i.e. Rs 9,999 available in colours like Charcoal, Heather Gray, Sandstone and Twilight Blue.
• Echo Dot with clock: Taking care of the question Alexa gets asked the most, ‘what is the time?’, the new Echo Dot comes with an inbuilt clock, a bright LED display that shows the time, outdoor temperature and alarms for Rs 5,499.

• Echo Studio: The best-sounding Echo ever, which features five directional speakers for an immersive studio-quality sound, room adaptation technology and a built-in smart home hub for Rs 22,999.

 

Features in built into the Echo Studio are Dolby Atmos compatibility to give you a theatre-like immersive surround sound when you pair it with your Fire TV. The Echo dot also comes with enhanced Alexa features to simplify your daily life giving you 10 minutes of extra snooze time, or recommending routines which is basically creating a routine around yours, giving you the information you need to have a “good morning” every morning.

Alexa updates include two new voice-based features that give users higher levels of communication with her. There is now more transparency in the responses one gets from Alexa and you can even ask, “Alexa, tell me what you heard” if you want to understand what it heard in your most recent voice request. Add to this you can adjust how fast or slow she speaks.

The Alexa ‘Hunch’ feature comes with ‘Frustration Detection’ updates to instinctively detect your frustration levels with her and can change her intonation to deal with the same.

 

But here’s the best upgrade. You can now Interact with Alexa either in Hindi or Hinglish
as she completely understands these languages in multiple contexts, and varied regional accents and dialects. Don’t take our word for it? Just ask Alexa for Hindi jokes, shayari, games, Panchatantra fables or even Bollywood dialogues.

Additional features like 'Alexa Whispers' to auto delete immediate voice recordings such as "Alexa delete everything I said today" or "Alexa delete everything I just said" and those older than three or 18 months regularly will be available later this year.

The devices are available for pre-order on Amazon.in and in select offline stores starting today and will start shipping later this year. Customers, who pre-order, can avail of a smart bulb at no extra cost, and a smart plug at Rs 199 only.

 

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Editing by Ritu Pandey and N. Lothungbeni Humtsoe