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Alexa will get round. The voice assistant has been in all varieties of gadgets, not simply Amazon’s Echo merchandise. You may discuss to Alexa in coffeemakers, take it on the highway with you, spend the vacations collectively, and even make it feed your pet. However inside lots of these merchandise—at the very least ones produced from 2019 and on—is identical core {hardware} and silicon. Via a software program improvement package (SDK) Amazon introduced this week, firms can nonetheless use Amazon’s cloud providers, Alexa apps, and abilities, whereas having better freedom over the {hardware} used to ship these providers.
In 2019, Amazon launched Alexa Join Equipment (ACK), which allowed tech manufacturers to make use of ACK modules, or, as Amazon explains it, “an Amazon-managed system-on-module” built-in into the Alexa gadget. It runs firmware that permits communication between the product and ACK-managed providers, which come courtesy of Amazon Internet Companies’ IoT enterprise.
Earlier than this week’s announcement, {hardware} was both a Mediatek WM-BN-MT-52 chipset with an Arm Cortex-M4 processor and MT7697H SoC or an Espressif ESP32-PICO-V3-ZERO, which makes use of Espressif’s ESP32-V3 SoC. Both ensures that makers of third-party Alexa merchandise do not must “write an Alexa ability, handle a cloud service, or develop advanced community and safety firmware” for the voice assistant to work.
