Amazon has added over 100 new voice commands for Alexa.
Have you ever thought of buying Alexa, the virtual home assistant? Well, now you one more reason or rather 100 more reasons to buy the smart talking cylinder since Amazing announced new voice commands for the ever-popular virtual assistant.
For those of you who have not heard about the ingenious virtual assistant or don’t care too much about technology, Alexa is a voice-powered assistant very similar to Siri or to Windows’s Cortana. Using Alexa, you can perform all kinds of tasks such as scheduling an appointment, asking for great places to dine or inquire about the weather.
However, Alexa is much more than that. The smart, voice-controlled assistant can switch on your TV, laptop or tablet, adjust the temperature, and even manage your bank account. There’s no limit to what Alexa can do, but, in order to make her perform these actions, you must buy voice commands from Alexa’s online shop.
At the moment, the shop includes over 5,000 voice commands or skills. Some of the most popular skills bought for the voice-controlled virtual assistant are Harmony (Optimized for Smart Home) which allows you to control Logitech Harmony home devices, Nest (for controlling Nest smart thermostats), and Find My Phone.
To make the voice-controlled assistant even more useful around the house, Amazon has released over one hundred new skills.
Note that Alexa’s programming distinguishes between intent aka skills and slots. Skills are voice commands which the voice assistant can quickly learn after downloading them from its skill store. Alexa’s original programming includes simple voice commands such as Cancel, Stop, Start, No, Yes, Enter, and Help.
The other type of information processed by this smart virtual assistant is slots. To put in simpler terms, slots relate to stuff like dates, cities, time, and weather forecast. Amazon has gone to great lengths to improve Alexa’s capacity of understanding and processing voice commands.
With the new skills released by Amazon, Alexa will understand your commands with increased accuracy. As a result, Alexa will have no trouble distinguishing between a command like Set Ambient Temperature to X Degrees Celsius and Tell Me A Joke.
And yes, you area able to instruct the witty virtual assistant to tell you jokes, just like asking Cortana or Siri. Another great skill recommended for Alexa is Play the 20 Questions Game. It’s entertaining, and you’ll see that Alexa has some very interesting challenges.
Image source: Amazon
