ALEXA SMART PROPERTIES
What is Alexa?
Alexa is a virtual assistant created and developed by Amazon, which you can interact with easily and immediately: using only your voice! Alexa understands what you ask her and answers you.
You can ask Alexa for various kinds of information, such as weather, news and traffic, or to play music.
With Alexa you can also control lights, heating, blinds and manage all the “smart home” and home automation elements in your home with a simple voice prompt.
What are skills for Alexa?
Amazon is involved in the evolution of Alexa day by day, adding features and improving its performance. Other partners outside and authorized by Amazon can create so-called “skills” and make them available to Alexa users. Skills are applications designed to add features to Alexa to make the user experience increasingly richer and more customizable.
For example, in NAVOO, we were responsible for the creation of “Raccolta rifiuti”. This skill makes it possible to ask Alexa what waste will be collected daily, based on the door-to-door recycling collection calendar for a specific area.
We also created skills intended for entertainment, real interactive games such as “Domanda del giorno” and “Just Words” Alexa leads the game and you play using only your voice!
In addition, we have worked and developed many skills for large international brands, with ever-changing and new features. There are over 30 of them: come and see some of them on our website!
How do you communicate with Alexa?
In order to interact with Alexa, you need to have an Echo speaker, which is a device (to be placed on a table, desk, shelf, or wherever you want) that sits waiting to hear your voice. The speakers have microphones to pick up what you say, and audio speakers to play Alexa’s voice, sounds or music. Speakers are designed to hear the word “Alexa” and only then listen and pick up the request made by the speaker.
The request is sent to a server (via the Internet, so devices must be connected to Wi-Fi at all times), where Alexa takes in what was said, processes it (using a skill if needed) and returns a response, which is played back in Alexa’s voice from the speaker.
You may be wondering if the speaker always listens to you and records everything? No, don’t worry!
Here you can find out how your privacy is protected.
Communication devices
Amazon speakers are called Echo. Some devices have only audio capabilities, while others also have a touch screen. There is a wide selection on the Amazon.co.uk website, with different shapes and sizes.
Interaction with the virtual assistant Alexa is now also possible via other speakers, through the smartphone or in the car. More and more devices today have the Alexa app integrated such as TVs, refrigerators, and ovens.
Alexa devices for hotels and nursing homes
The Alexa Smart Properties system is supported only by certain types of Echo series devices.
