Skip to main content
  • This book imagines what animals might look like if humans went extinct
    09.06.2018 - 0 Comments
    If humans disappeared from the face of the Earth, letting evolution run its course, what would animals look…
  • Trump administration sues California over tough net neutrality law
    01.10.2018 - 0 Comments
  • WhatsApp will now label forwarded messages
    11.07.2018 - 0 Comments
    WhatsApp is now labeling its forwarded messages, in a move that the company hopes will curb some of the…
  • Byton adds another screen to its car full of screens
    07.01.2019 - 0 Comments
  • Huawei considers making a smartwatch that stores a pair of wireless earbuds
    02.07.2018 - 0 Comments

Amazon says over a million people have preordered Echo Auto

By

Apparently a lot of people want to put Alexa in their cars, as Amazon tells TechCrunch it received over a million preorders for the company’s recently announced Echo Auto. The credit card-sized device sits on your dashboard and brings Alexa capabilities to your car via a 3.5mm aux jack, or over a smartphone’s existing Bluetooth setup.

Amazon recently revealed it has sold more than 100 million devices with Alexa, so in the scope of things, 1 million might not seem like that much. But it is for an aftermarket car product. It’s also a significant number considering that’s just the number of Echo Autos Amazon let people buy. The product remains in preorder since it was announced earlier this year, and preordering is invite-only. That means, theoretically, there are a larger amount of people interested in this aftermarket Alexa solution for their car.

There are other third-party gadgets that put Alexa in your car. Anker’s $49.99 Viva adapter is coming sometime this year, and should let you do all things Alexa, from navigate map instructions with voice commands to control music or get weather information.

Alexa is also directly integrated with some infotainment systems — namely Toyota, BMW, Ford, and Audi — but that’s only a small chunk of the car market. And even some of those companies with formal Alexa integrations have delivered cumbersome executions without full Alexa capabilities.

This also isn’t Amazon’s first play to get into people’s cars. Last year, it started a new service with General Motors and Volvo giving couriers access to the trunk of your car for package deliveries. So sure, Amazon partnerships for cars exist, but this is the most explicit attempt by Amazon to takeover the inside of your car.



from The Verge - Teches http://bit.ly/2FhU0Qg

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The PlayStation Classic has a secret debug menu that can be reached with specific keyboards

By
Just a day after the release of the PlayStation Classic , the Retro Gaming Arts YouTube channel has discovered that you can access the emulator’s settings menu by plugging a keyboard into a free USB slot and hitting the Esc key. Doing so reveals a host of settings for the built-in open-source PCSX ReARMed emulator, potentially allowing access to options, including save states, controls, and cheats. The discovery has raised hope that some of the criticisms of the retro console , such as a limited game library and poor image quality, could soon be addressed with third-party modding. In the discovered menus, an option to “Load CD Image” is clearly visible, which suggests it might be possible to load additional games or perhaps just the better-performing 60Hz NTSC variants. An option to enable scanlines, the horizontal lines that allow an LCD screen to emulate the look of a traditional CRT monitor, is also present. Despite the discovery, it’s unlikely that the hardware limitations o...
Post a Comment
Read more

With Toys R Us gone, Amazon wants to send out a holiday toy catalog of its own

By
Now that Amazon has helped kill off Toys R Us , it wants to borrow the retailer’s iconic print holiday toy catalog . The online behemoth is interested in creating its own print catalog to mail out and also be handed out at Whole Foods (which it owns), according to Bloomberg . Toys R Us was plagued with billions in debt when permanently closed last month — in part because of competition from online stores like Amazon . For many kids, its “Big Book” toy catalog was a staple of fall. The 100-page catalog would arrive near the end of October for kids to look through and create a wishlist before December. Now that the retailer is done, various companies are trying to scoop up the customers that headed to their shelves every December. Party City, for example, will open 50 pop-up toy shops for the holidays. Target will have more store space for toys . It’s just especially amusing that Amazon, having helped kill off these physical retailers, is trying to learn from them to make even mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

Amazon’s plans for a New York office are under new scrutiny

By
A month ago, when Amazon announced that it would build regional offices in New York and Virginia at great expense to the taxpayers there, I wrote that it had misunderstood the moment : Perhaps the furor over Amazon’s regional offices will blow over. But it’s hard not to feel today as if the company misread the room — overestimating the public’s appetite for a billion-dollar giveaway to one of the world’s biggest companies, and underestimating the public’s ability to raise hell on- and offline. Amazon may yet feel that pain, in the long run. Today, Amazon met the room: 150 protesters who showed up to the first New York City Council hearing about the plan. According to reports from the scene, demonstrators’ concerns start with the $3 billion in incentives that New York plans to give Amazon in exchange for locating there — and, it says, creating 25,000 jobs. Here’s Leticia Miranda in BuzzFeed : ”You’re worth a trillion dollars,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson told the ...
Post a Comment
Read more