It starts like any other day. You wake up early thanks to your alarm, get ready, and prepare for breakfast with your morning coffee. While you're getting ready at the table for your first meal of the day, it's important to catch up on the latest news, since it's good to know what's happening in the world. You usually turn on the TV and select your favorite news program—perhaps CNN, CBS, or a national channel? The important thing is to stay informed. The problem is that you only have a few minutes, since you need to catch up before leaving for the office. And these days, morning news programs have adopted a magazine format, going over the same story many times, meaning you'll only have time for a couple of celebrity news stories, maybe.
One of the increasingly acute problems in our cities is traffic, so you'll need someone to come to your aid and inform you about the traffic you'll have to navigate on your way to work. As I mentioned before, the news magazine won't be very useful for this purpose, so you'll have to make time to browse Twitter, perhaps to get a more accurate reference. Ultimately, you'll have to rely on GPS and Waze to be your guiding light on the treacherous path through the vehicular jungle.
No one can deny that we live in a time of climate uncertainty. For example, a few years ago we knew for certain that the seasons were spring, summer, autumn, and winter, and when each season began and ended. Today, however, this "theory" isn't very useful. Therefore, every day before leaving home, you should know the current weather and the forecast for the day. This way, you'll know what clothing you'll need and what precautions you should take. So, what can you do? Wait for the weatherman on the TV news and trust that his forecasts are accurate and you don't end up having a bad time? Another option is to take some time and browse the Weather Channel on your laptop, tablet, or smartphone to get more reliable data, which will actually take a little time.
Thus, in reality, every morning in your daily life you need reliable information input; in addition to what has been mentioned, you have an agenda to check, in the case of housewives, they have a shopping list to verify, etc.
But at home, it's not all work. While we're at the office, our home continues to "live." The children arrive in the afternoon from school or university, and while they have lunch or rest—after their homework—they surely listen to music online through Pandora or another service. It's common to use Wikipedia to answer some questions.
Whether in our work, studies, research, or domestic activities, we are immersed in technology and use many devices that help us obtain information or for entertainment.
Let me introduce you to Alexa.
A few months ago, Amazon launched the product called "Amazon Echo", which is a voice command device.
According to information obtained from Wikipedia: “…The device consists of a large, 9-inch (23 cm) talking cylinder with a sensor array of 7 microphones…Amazon has been developing Echo within its Lab126 facilities in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts…Amazon Echo runs on Amazon Web Services, which are Amazon's cloud computing services… Echo includes a Texas Instruments DM3725 ARM Cortex-A8 processor, 256MB of LPDDR RAM, and 4GB of storage. Connectivity is provided by dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n and Bluetooth 4…Its high accuracy is achieved through sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) algorithms built into Echo's speech synthesis engine…”
The functionalities of “Alexa” – the name to which the Amazon Echo responds – are:
- Local search: Get information about local businesses and restaurants from Yelp.
- Listen to your audiobooks
- Calendars: Check your event calendar by asking what's on the Google calendar.
- Purchases: Replenish previously purchased items by reordering Prime-eligible products in your Amazon purchase history.
- Smart home: control home devices with your voice, such as lights.
- Traffic: Listen to travel time and the fastest route to your destination.
- Sports: Ask for sports scores and schedules for the NFL, NBA, MLS, MLB, NHL, NCAA, WNBA, and more.
- Pandora: Listen to and discover music from Pandora's library of over 1 million tracks.
- Listen to your Amazon Music Library, Primer Música, TuneIn, and iHeartRadio.
- News, weather, and information: Listen to up-to-the-minute weather and news from a variety of sources, including local radio stations, NPR, and ESPN from TuneIn.
- Questions and answers: Get information from Wikipedia, definitions, answers to common questions, and more.
- Alarms, timers, and lists: Stay on time and organized with voice-controlled alarms, timers, shopping lists, and to-do lists.
I have personally used the product and I recommend it to users of technological products. There are security issues that are debatable, as with everything in the "cloud," and by the way, for now Alexa only "speaks" in English, however, it really is having the Internet of Things in your home.
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