Politicians love to make claims during their speeches, whether it be to discredit their rivals/opponents, or to help further their agenda. Now sometimes these claims can be true, maybe a bit exaggerated but for the most part true. Sometimes they can be false and embarrassingly so.
So what if you are home and you’re trying to figure out if what a politician is saying is true or false? Sure, you could always fire up Google to help fact check, but if you’re too lazy to read, Amazon’s Echo has gained a new skill in which it can be used to help fact check what a politician has said.
Created by the Duke Reporters’ Lab, “With the new Share the Facts skill, owners of the Echo and other Alexa-enabled devices, including the Tap and the Dot, can ‘ask the fact-checkers’ about claims they hear from presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, as well as other candidates and politicians who have been checked.” Some of the app’s launch partners include PolitiFact, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and FactCheck.org.
However it seems that while the app does show promise, it does seem a bit quirky in its operations. Users will not only have to sit through an introduction each time, but they’ll also have to use specific keywords to get the most accurate response, meaning that if you’re just making a general query it might not work quite as well.