Amazon’s Alexa To Speak Without Voice Commands

Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, will no longer need voice commands to speak to you. Amazon is reportedly gearing up to have its digital assistant offer up information before you can request it, according to a report from The Information.

For example, Alexa will be able to tell you via your Echo when your Uber ride has arrived instead of waiting for you to ask. The update could come later this fall, according to the report. If Alexa is able to work without voice prompts, it would be a huge shift for the product and would mark a new era in digital personal assistants. After all, Apple’s Siri only reacts when prompted by a voice. The report noted Alexa would take cues from connected apps to provide information based on your settings. Users won’t have to worry about Alexa randomly starting a conversation.

Separately, Amazon is bringing Alexa to the new Fire HD 8, announcing it will have the voice-activated assistant in it. The eight-inch tablet goes for $90 and includes a number of upgrades, including 1.5GB of RAM, which is 50 percent more. The base storage also increased to 16GB and 32GB. The new battery in the Fire HD 8 is rated for up to 12 hours of use, Amazon said. The Fire HD 8 marks the first time Alexa is offered on anything other than Amazon’s Echo smart speakers and the Fire TV. The larger Fire HD 10 will also get Alexa via a software update later in 2016. Amazon said the new device will be available on Sept. 21.

Alexa may not be as well-known as Apple’s Siri, but companies have been doing innovative things with the voice-activated assistant. Take the PYMNTS/Alexa Challenge, for example. After 12 teams and 14 companies participated in a five-week competition to use Alexa and her voice-activated technology to reimagine how consumers interact with their payments and financial services solutions providers, the winners of the 2016 PYMNTS/Alexa Challenge were announced earlier this year.

Those 14 companies — Best Innovation Group (BIG), DaVincian Healthcare, Discover, Exa, Feasty powered by Zipscene, FIS, Fiserv, ONvocal powered by People Power, USAA, Vantiv, Visa and Western Union — dug deep into their innovation bag to solve everything from the $60 billion annual prescription abandonment problem to making checkout abandonment a thing of the past. Some were focused on giving chatbots a run for their money in the customer service arena, while others used the technology to make financial services more accessible to a variety of customer segments.

The innovations were featured in videos, and people were able to view them and vote on PYMNTS.com over a five-week period. Voters were able to choose from these categories when voting: Most Creative, Most Disruptive, Best Use Of The Technology, Easiest To Explain To Mom, Most Likely To Get Traction and the ultimate award, the 2016 PYMNTS/Alexa Challenge Champ.