Amazon smart home focuses on artificial intelligence

Over the course of an hour on Tuesday, September 28, Amazon rolled out a raft of new smart home products, including an Alexa-powered robot, a wall-mountable Echo smart display, an interactive video phone for kids, the first video doorbell from its Blink division, new home-security products from its Ring subsidiary, and more. Artificial intelligence--Amazon calls it "ambient" intelligence--was a common thread running through all these new products. The company says this will enable its disparate products to work together seamlessly to deliver an experience that's more than the sum of its parts. But with a nod to consumers' growing privacy concerns, each presenter emphasized the ways in which Amazon's development teams had focused on reducing their products' reliance on cloud computing, pushing more processing power to the device itself to keep information local and within the users' control. Here's a quick recap of the most significant new product announcements, along with links to our deeper dives.