When it comes to the highly competitive voice assistant market, Amazon isn't playing around. It recently rolled out an update that lets developers notify Alexa users with audible pings and flashing LEDs, brought Alexa to smartphones such as the Huawei Mate 9, and and introduced Google Home-like personalised voice recognition to its Echo speakers. Needless to say, the retailer's taking its market dominance very seriously, and Amazon's newest project — support for new voice commands on Fire TV devices — dovetails with the company's other efforts.
Amazon brought Alexa to its set-top Fire TV devices in July, and the integration works pretty much like you'd expect — you can use an Alexa-powered speaker, smartphone, Fire TV remote, or tablet to control video playback, search for videos, and launch any app on the Fire TV. Now, starting this week, Fire TV applications from Bravo, CBS, Hulu, NBC, Showtime, and Sony PlayStation Vue gained support for Alexa voice commands.
Here's how it works: When you're in the Hulu app or any of the other updated applications, you can say, "Alexa, go to ESPN", for example, and the Hulu channel for ESPN will start playing. You can pause, play, rewind, or fast-forward the video with subsequent voice commands, or ask to start an episode over, skip it, or go back to the previous episode.
All you need to take advantage is an Alexa-enabled device, of course. (Amazon's Echo Dot, which retails for about $50, isn't a bad choice.) If you've got that part covered, simply updating your Fire TV's applications to their latest respective versions should be enough to get the feature working — they're compatible with the Amazon Fire TV (1st, 2nd, and 3rd Generation), Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, Fire TV Stick with Voice Remote, and the Fire TV Stick (1st and 2nd Generation).
Give it a try, and check out the blog post from the Amazon Fire TV for more information.
Source: Amazon Fire TV Blog
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