Amazon’s Alexa May Get The Ability To Talk Without Being Spoken To First

As it stands right now, Amazon Echo is the well-behaved child your grandparents might have approved of: it doesn’t speak until spoken to. But soon Alexa could be piping up to offer information without being prompted first.

According to a report from The Information, Amazon is considering enable push notifications for Alexa that would let the virtual assistant speak up with alerts from any Echo-connected apps and gadgets.

As it stands now, if you want Alexa to do something, you have to say something like, “Alexa, order 30 pallets of cat food and the special edition boxed set of My So-Called Life DVDs.”

The Information points out that Amazon will have to be careful in developing the feature to make sure Alexa doesn’t start yapping away when she shouldn’t, like interrupting conversations or say, a quiet part in a movie. Amazon could accomplish that perhaps by letting users manage their notification preferences in the Alexa app, and have say, the lights on the Echo, Tap, and Dot gadgets flash when there’s a new notification.

Amazon Preps Push Notifications for Alexa [The Information]
(h/t TechCrunch)

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