Amazon held its AWS conference in Las Vegas, where the company announced that AWS is stepping into the Internet of Things devices by bringing voice control capabilities to low-powered devices. That means the company is working on making low powered devices compatible with Alexa. Until now, Alexa only worked on the dives who had the minimum 100MB of RAM and an ARM Cortex A-class processor.
With Amazon making Alexa available for low powered devices, the minimum required specification will be 1MB and a cheaper Cortex-M processor. So in the near future, devices such as lightbulbs, light switches, and other simple, single-purpose devices will support commands from Alexa.
“We now offload the vast majority of all of this to the cloud,” AWS IoT VP Dirk Didascalou said in an interview. “So the device can be ultra dumb. The only thing that the device still needs to do is wake word detection. That still needs to be covered on the device.” With Alexa integration, Amazon is planning to reduce the costs of voice control by up to 50% and offloading the processing requirement of cloud saving. “That means you will be able to hope in the future see many more form factors and devices now being able to be voice-controlled and directly spoken to,” said Didascalou. “I leave it up to your imagination to think what that would mean.”
The integration of Alexa in small devices may also jeopardize privacy as there will be more and more microphones in devices and these devices will be listening and recording everything.