Amazon Alexa gets upgrades and more on Tech Talk With Craig Peterson today on Maine's WGAN Saturday Show [10-5-19]

Amazon is working diligently to make its Alexa platform even more useful and wow they have really made some great improvements.
For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com
---
Related Articles:
Alexa, Now A Truly Useful Smart Assistant
---
Automated Machine-Generated Transcript:
Craig 0:08 Hey Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. I'm wasn't sure if I was clear about this. But the main reason I started talking about my password special report in the last segment was that you should change your password right away if you're using any of the Zynga products, but most particularly if you use Words with Friends, because so much data was apparently stolen, and it's a bad thing. Okay, so again, the password special report you can get at Craig Peterson comm slash subscribe, slash subscribe. Alright, so let's get down to this. This is kind of cool. We of course had Apple's big announcements last month, and they announced that brand new, very cool iPhone 11. Now, I would not bother upgrading to it. But man, does it have professional photography features, and you probably aren't aware of this. But the latest beta of iOS 13. That isn't out yet. iOS 13 is out obviously, right? You probably have it, I certainly have it. So iOS 13 is out there. So here's the trick.
We were talking about the iOS 13 stuff. They have some new features in this beta, using the iPhone 11th camera, some features that cameras had that were not released yet. So pay attention to that, I think it's going to be kind of cool. So let's talk about 12 new Alexa features to up your Amazon Echo game because Amazon had their big event, which they do. And it is kind of a fall event. It's a couple of weeks after Apple's event. And Amazon as usual, announced a whole bunch of new echo products. Now the Amazon Echo is really kind of owning the industry right now. And a lot of people know what as Alexa. And I have a number of these devices. And I really do like them. But they've got the echo auto, the Echo, the gen three Echo Dot and the echo sub as well as a whole bunch of new hardware. Now I we have the Amazon Echo, I think it's the first generation might be the second and it's got the screen on it, we use it to talk to one of our grandkids who lives out of state so she can call us we can call her. In fact, you can use it to make phone calls as well. But they have a new one called Alexa guard. And this is a feature that makes your Echo listen for window breaks or activated alarms. And if it's triggered, it sends you there's alert and let some listen to a snippet of the sound. I think that is really cool. fact I'm going to try and see what happens if I turn that on. That's something that could run locally on the machine, I'm sure doesn't really have to send it up to the cloud until it's going to send you the little tidbit. So along with a hardware announcements last week, the big question people are asking is what is up next when it comes to Alexa? So Alexa, tell me what you heard. And why did you do that? If you use the Amazon Alexa much, you know, sometimes it doesn't understand what you're saying. And so you have to ask it, tell me what you heard. Now you can, because it'll, it'll play back what it heard. And that actually helps you quite a bit to understand what is going on. Right? So she'll go ahead and share what she heard you say sometimes it it seems like a small addition, but it's going really add a whole bunch of clarity for you. Another one that's going to be very helpful is why did you do that. And that's going to have Alexa, explain why it performed any action at all. So if all of a sudden the music starts to play, you know, or somebody on the radio says Alexa like I have been, and then wakes it up. And then it starts to listen, and then it tries to run a command. You can ask it you can say why did you do that? And she'll tell you, which I think is absolutely fantastic. Now they've got a new feature that is really going to help you this is an auto delete. A lot of us have been worried about the voice recordings that she keeps. And you can tell Alexa now to delete voice recordings every three or 18 months. And you can also tell her to delete what you just said or delete everything that you have said. So it that makes it really easy. So just say bye, delete what I just said, or delete everything I've said today. And you have to go into the Alexa app in order to turn on these wider ranging deletion of recordings. Now remember, she's not listening all of the balance sheet, she's not transmitting everything that she hears all of the time up to the cloud, she's not recording that she's listening for her way cord, of course, you can change it, you can have her wake on the word computer. I think there's another one as well. And so some people do that I you know, I go back and forth on that. But I like the idea that all of those 32nd recordings that she has made when she woke up can be deleted. And that that's a very good thing. Now it's got this whole neural text thing now, and Alexa has echo has Amazon Echo has some really great text to speech technology. I've always been amazed. I use it to even Fang find out spelling for things. So you just ask her, how do you spell this, and she'll spell it for you. And she's she's created that right. But she also understands other languages. So you can tell her to translate French, Spanish, Hindi, and other languages now. And this, this text to speech features been improved. So it's considered to be more emotive and expressive. And it sounds better. I don't know if you've noticed or not. And beginning a little later this year, Amazon's going to be rolling out some celebrity voices for Alexa. And this is kind of cool. They're going to be based on limited recordings with a celebrity. So unlike the basic voice that it comes with, where they spend a lot of time recording just about every word that Alexa might need to say. They just basing it on a few limited ones. Now think about what we've talked about. And I've talked with Ken and Matt about a lot of that has to do with these, these deep fakes. So they're going to basically be using deep fake technology. They've got Samuel Jackson, he's the first one that's going to be released, I think that might be actually kind of funny. The guy is hilarious, sometimes. But they're going to be releasing those that'll be the first celebrity voice. And we're going to see how it works. I call it neural text to speech. It's got frustration detection now, which I think is a huge, huge win. We've seen frustration detection and some of these voice systems where you call into a company, and it talks to you and says, describe your problem until you describe your problem. And so those have been detecting frustration stress in the voice. And sometimes they'll just if you're yelling headed, it'll go ahead and transfer you to a real operator. In this case, what's going to happen if if the Alexa sense is some frustration in your voice. It's going to apologize and attempt to clarify what it is you really want and recover and learn from that. Which is ultimately going to be really good again, that's kind of a machine learning thing. They're also helping you with cooking now I've noticed that on the echo because it it has on its display. Learn how to boil water. Well. Okay, well, not that bad. Pretty darn close. Right? How do they even had one how to make toast? Are you kidding me? Right? Just some crazy things. I knew something was in the works, knew something was cooking our well it turns out, they're going to be able to help us as cook meals via a Food Network collaboration. And customers are going to be able to access recipes, take cooking classes on the echo devices and you can buy these at Amazon. And it's going to come with commands like Alexa, show cooking classes from Bobby Flay, or Alexa, how many chicken thighs Was I supposed to use Alexa, save that recipe. I use Alexa also for my shopping list at the grocery store. It's got some other things too smart screen software development kit, Alexa communications for kids. It has free time, Wi Fi control hunches. This is a new feature that they're finally releasing here until the Alexa guard upgrades as well. Well when we get back our last last section for today's segment, we talked a little bit about Apple Maps a father identity theft, and a vengeful IT admin. We were going to start with that one. So stick around. You're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online at Craig peterson.com. Stick around because we'll be right back with lots more great information.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai 
---
More stories and tech updates at:
www.craigpeterson.com
Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating:
www.craigpeterson.com/itunes
Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at:
www.twitter.com/craigpeterson
For questions, call or text:
855-385-5553