Amazon Reduces Device Confusion Among Alexa Devices

Due to the fact that Amazon made Alexa so freely available for developers to use in their products, we’ve started to see a ton of Alexa-powered devices in the market today. This is of course a good thing since it means variety, but a bad thing because it can also lead to device confusion.

However the good news is that this is a problem that Amazon has recently addressed. The company has recently made its Echo Spatial Perception (ESP) feature available in the cloud, which means that all existing Alexa-enabled devices will be able to benefit from it with no changes required from the user.

For those who are unfamiliar or unaware of ESP, basically this is a feature that Amazon has built into its Echo speakers. Device confusion seems to be a problem that Amazon was aware of early on, and what ESP does is that it tries to approximate which device is closest to the person issuing a voice command, and will use that device to process the command instead of all devices doing it at once.

For example if you have an Echo speaker in your kitchen and living room, it wouldn’t make sense for both speakers to activate at once when you say, “Hey Alexa,” which is what ESP is trying to reduce. Now that ESP will be available to all Alexa-enabled devices, this should help make the overall process neater.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Gadgets, General
Tags: Alexa, Amazon, Speakers