Amazon is updating its artificial intelligence assistant Alexa with more hockey knowledge, having announced its latest move just as the Stanley Cup Final season is beginning. The Seattle, Washington-based tech giant shared a list of a broad range of new questions related to the sport that its digital helper can now answer, both to help fill one’s hockey knowledge gaps and keep them entertained between games. In terms of practically useful features, Alexa can now pull Stanley Cup and team-specific fixtures, recap games, recite player performance stats, and provide users with a wide variety of historical stats ranging from the amount of goal scored by professional players to the size of any particular hockey team’s trophy cabinet.
Amazon also committed additional resources to making Alexa more capable of acting as your hockey buddy, so starting today, you’re able to ask it about its Stanley Cup hopes and predictions, as well as request hockey-related and team-specific jokes. The AI assistant is now also able to reveal whether it likes hokey and can recite poems related to the popular sport, the company confirmed. Alexa remains the dominant digital helper in North America, according to most industry trackers, though the growth of Alexa-enabled devices is now being outpaced by those with support for Google Assistant.
Amazon is positioning Alexa as the central piece of its smart home equation meant to connect all of the firm’s first-party devices and compatible Internet of Things gadgets such as cameras, locks, and doorbells. The digital companion is still widely estimated to be less capable of reacting to queries in a conversational manner than Google Assistant is, though Amazon continues to pour significant resources into improving it on a regular basis. Alexa has also been making headlines over the course of the last week after a major privacy gaffe that saw it secretly record a private conversation and send it to a random person in another state.