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Amazon imagines Alexa in hot tubs and toothbrushes in its Super Bowl ad

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Maybe it’s because CES only happened a few weeks ago, but Amazon’s Super Bowl ad is giving me flashbacks to rows of gadgets touting Alexa in places where it didn’t belong. Amazon’s ad acknowledges that the company itself has been putting Alexa in a lot of stuff, too, including a voice-activated microwave, and that some combinations haven’t always been so successful.

The commercial imagines a bunch of celebrities using Alexa with gadgets that ultimately didn’t make the cut: Forest Whitaker using an Alexa toothbrush to play podcasts that get muddled by his mouth; Harrison Ford’s dog abusing his “Alexa dog collar for dogs” and using it to order sausages and gravy; and Broad City stars Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer getting shot out of an Alexa hot tub (which looks like an oversized Echo dot) by powerful jet streams. Finally, there’s the “incident,” in which twin astronauts Mark and Scott Kelly somehow manage to use Alexa to power on and off... the Earth? It’s silly, but at least it’s a self-aware ad that shows Amazon knows Alexa doesn’t belong in just about everything.

If you want to see more, there are some teaser clips of the celebs getting ready to test out Amazon’s beta testing program on this website, with more to be shared during the Super Bowl this Sunday.



from The Verge - Teches http://bit.ly/2FXgarq
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