Alexa is a powerful virtual digital assistant from Amazon. It offers a wide variety of features including but not limited to answering questions. There are instances when Alexa doesn’t know the answer to a particular question. Amazon has now added a new feature to the assistant called “Answer Update.” It lets the assistant notify the user at a later date when it learns the answer to an old question that it wasn’t able to answer previously.
This new feature was spotted when a user asked Alexa for more information about a news story and Alexa responded by saying it doesn’t have answers to all questions sometimes.
It then asked the user if they wanted to activate Answer Updates. When asked to define what this meant, Alexa replied: “If you ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, but I find out later, I’ll notify you.”
When Alexa doesn’t know the answer, it falls back on set phrases such as “I don’t know that, but I’m always learning.” With this feature enabled, Alexa will send the user an on-device notification when it learns the answer to the question that they asked. It’s a neat feature that makes the assistant more useful.
Answer Updates will remain an opt-in feature which should be available to all Alexa users in the coming days.