Alexa Together — A Review of Alexa’s Latest Product
Alexa Together is Alexa’s latest product according to their website. Let’s take a look at Alexa Together, its features, abilities, effectiveness, goals, and more.
A brief introduction about the technology used in Alexa:
Alexa wasn’t initially based on Amazon’s own idea to begin with. It’s said to be based on text-to-speech synthesizer Ivona, and Amazon bought it in the year 2013. It’s a voice-based virtual assistant technology, which means that it can take input, commands, instructions, and queries through voice. This is not limited to just words but commonly used acronyms, numbers, dates, time, and symbols as well. It uses automatic speech recognition and NLP (natural language processing) to take in these inputs and understand the user’s commands. And it interacts with users mainly in the form of voice by giving outputs based on the TTS technology.
What is Amazon’s Alexa mostly used for?
Unlike Google Assistant, which works on your android smartphone, Alexa requires that there be an Alexa-enabled gadget in your home for you to use this technology. Most commonly, it runs on Amazon’s Echo Dot. Till now, Alexa’s main goal has been home automation, that is to help you do tasks in and around your home automatically. Not only can you set reminders, play music, set up weather alerts, and keep your home safe, but you can do more using this technology.
You can use featured routines based on Alexa’s routine templates, or you set up your own routines. If you’re planning a travel, Alexa makes it very easy for you by giving you all the information you’d need to know, like the distance between your place and the destination, the traffic on the way, public transport options, and more. It can also translate several different languages for you to understand and get the information you need.
Alexa Together — Benefits and Advantages:
Alexa Together is Amazon’s new care-giving technology. This helps you stay in touch with those family members who might need your assistance or care-giving even when you two are apart, living even in different states or countries. This way, you can focus on your academics or career or personal life without feeling the guilt of not being to be able to take care of, say, an ailing family member or elderly parent. This technology requires that your family member have an Alexa-enabled device at their home, and when you connect to it with an Alexa app on your smartphone, you can get regular alerts about their routines.
Let’s say that they’ve met with an accident or are sick. When Alexa Together recognizes that, you would immediately receive alerts on your end. This technology also allows the user, your family member to seek immediate help 24/7 whenever there is an emergency or if they want to simply speak to a medical professional. This technology is said to be supported by a team of professionals 24/7.
In daily life, Alexa Together allows you to set reminders for them from your place regarding their medicines or check-up or other reminders they might need, like setting up a groceries shopping list. Amazon says that as the technology advances, you’d be able to do more.
How does the fall detection work?
Alexa Together works with fall-detection gadgets that either both button-operated or automatic, such as Vayyar or SkyAngelCare. Through these devices, Alexa would be able to know that your loved one has fallen or they have met with an accident, and you’d get immediate alerts.
Disadvantages that You would Most Likely Face:
This is not a fully automated technology, and that should be a key disappointment. What if/when the caregiver themselves are too busy to care? What when the caregiver is asleep or not reachable or stuck in an important business meeting? That way, Alexa Together is still not as useful from a caregiver’s point of view. For as long as your loved one is keeping well, this would only give you more notifications than you already have to deal with. And in that unfortunate event where your family member or parent meets with an accident or needs immediate help, you would be required to take some action — Alexa Together can most likely not handle that all by itself.
We will have to wait and see what features Amazon’s Alexa will be adding and if they can make life a lot easier for both the caregivers and family members. But for now, this only feels like a getting a view of your loved one’s day and status and staying connected with them at best.
Also, would elderly people appreciate this as much as we’d like to think they would? For them, would an additional gadget that you buy for them, one that you use from far away to keep a tab on their daily activities make much of a change, really? Don’t think so, especially when the technology is not fully automated, thereby not guaranteeing us maximum safety and immediate assistance as we’d probably like. For now, Amazon’s Alexa Together seems to be able to accomplish not a lot more than what connected wearables and apps on the phone can do for both the caregiver and their loved one. Umm … It’s not really “Together” yet, is it, Alexa? But again, like we’ve to do with any AI technology, we have to be patient.
You can find more information about Alexa Together on their website here.
