The holiday season is upon us, and it looks like online retail giant Amazon is doing its own little bit to try and spread holiday cheer among Star Wars fans. Thanks to the latest software update being rolled out to the Amazon Echo, the device now has enough knowledge about the Jedi and their lightsabers to answer a whole host of questions regarding the much-loved sci-fi series. Amazon’s intelligent personal assistant, Alexa, now has the ability to answer Star Wars queries, like “What is the Jedi code?” and “What is the best Star Wars movie?”. She’ll also provide Star Wars trivia upon being asked “Alexa, give me a Star Wars fact”. Then there’s the Santa’s Helper feature which can answer questions on Santa’s current location, tell facts about Christmas and reveal whether you made the naughty or nice list this year. Alexa can now also read you a Christmas story, if that’s what you want. But wait, there’s more! With the election campaign on in full force, Alexa now can also offer factoids and share jokes regarding the candidates.
For the uninitiated, Amazon Echo is a wireless speaker that is designed and developed by online retailer Amazon. The abilities of the device of course, extends far beyond just streaming music via Bluetooth. The device can accept voice commands, and responds to the name ‘Alexa’, which is how one needs to engage the AI (Artificial Intelligence) built into the smart speaker. The Echo was launched by the Seattle, Washington-based online retail giant in November last year, but sales were initially restricted only to Amazon Prime members. It was only earlier this year that Amazon made the gadget available universally, and since then, has rolled out regular updates with an almost unerring regularity.
The Echo comes with the intelligent Alexa Voice Service that can not only answer a whole lot of questions, but can interact with other smart home-automation products, with the help of voice commands. Talking about voice commands, as mentioned already, the trigger word for the gadget happens to be ‘Alexa’, much like Google Now responds to ‘OK Google’, Apple’s Siri responds to ‘Hey Siri’ and Microsoft’s Cortana responds to ‘Hey Cortana’. Apart from addressing all the burning questions regarding Star Wars, the Amazon Echo can also answer queries regarding sports, weather and pop culture. It can also read recipes from cookbooks to you while you’re cooking. All, completely hands-free, by just using voice commands.