SAN JOSE, Calif. – New silicon and services are on the way to expand the emerging field of ambient computing Amazon pioneered with Alexa. New options may arrive this year from Google, Microsoft, Intel and perhaps Apple for devices with built-in voice interfaces linked to cloud services. In a sign of how fast the field

Alexa ain’t no snitch.Image: Christina ascani/mashable By Brett Williams2017-02-24 00:59:58 UTC Add yet another skill to Alexa’s repertoire: staunch defense of the First Amendment.  Amazon is holding firm and refusing to hand over voice and transcription data recorded by an Echo speaker to prosecutors in Arkansas as part of a murder trial.  Amazon maintains the

You get notifications from all sorts of services — Facebook, Twitter, UberEATS — but what happens if your home has an issue? If you have an iPhone, a camera could just tell you what’s up. This week, D-Link has launched the first device intended to keep you abreast of what’s happening at home if you

Amazon proudly announced today it’s adding its 10,000th skill to the Echo, the company’s artificially intelligent speaker. About a year ago, I wrote a love letter to my Echo praising it as the ultimate gadget for a lazy stoner. The prospect of greatness seemed so obvious. The speaker was quickly getting smarter, and soon I’d

Amazon has announced another Alexa-related milestone: more than 10,000 skills are now available. (A “skill” is Alexa’s equivalent of a mobile app.) The skill that helped Alexa reach 10,000 is a musical game called Beat the Intro, which invites players to guess song titles based just on the opening bars of music before the singing

Recently, tech leaders including Tesla CEO Elon Musk and billionaire Bill Gates warned about robots taking over jobs. However, a new report shows people are not that concerned about job automation.                                                                        

Honeywell International has filed an antitrust suit in an effort to stop a merger of two of its competitors in the smart home technology business. Honeywell seeks to stop the $140 million acquisition of two divisions of Icontrol Networks by Alarm.com, claiming the combined entity would have 70 percent share of the market for software

Alexa has skills.Image: Getty Images By Sasha Lekach2017-02-23 23:20:44 UTC Alexa: Congratulate yourself. Amazon’s digital assistant for the Echo and other devices officially has 10,000 skills, the company announced Thursday. The lucky 10,000th skill: Beat the Intro, a game that tests your ability to recognize songs.  It joins a growing list of talents, including the