Amazon is being urged to rename its personal assistant because girls also named Alexa are being relentlessly bullied by other schoolchildren, their parents say. The Alexa assistant -- which was launched in 2014, but only had its UK debut in 2016 -- can increasingly be found in homes via Amazon's Echo and Echo Dot devices. Not only is the AI-powered system named Alexa, it is also the default'wake word' used to alert Amazon devices that an instruction or question will follow. However, this has led to individuals named Alexa becoming the butt of recurring jokes in which their name is shouted, followed by a command. The assistant's granting of a name shared by real people has resulted in movements such as'Alexa is a Human' -- which is lobbying Amazon to reconsider the choice.

Amazon is opening up its AI tech to automakers and other third-companies with a new product called Alexa Custom Assistant. It will allow brands to build their own custom intelligent assistants that "co-exist" with Alexa, according to Amazon. That will allow them to create unique wake words, voices and capabilities "to each company's unique personality and customer needs," the company wrote in a press release. Alexa Custom Assistant will let customers use both Alexa and their own branded assistant to do something called "simultaneous multi-assistant cooperation. "This allows the brand's assistant to act as the product specialist, while Alexa is still available to help with everyday needs," Amazon wrote.

Anyone would be forgiven for being heartily sick of hearing the term Artificial Intelligence. But over the whole of the past decade, AI has grown to already being something that impacts our lives everyday. Very soon it will be threaded through everything like DNA and we will stop noticing it, just as we don't notice how electricity is part of daily life. Deep Learning, which when a computer system is fed a big amount of data to recognise patterns much faster than human beings can also goes on to arm itself with knowledge humans didn't know. We use more simple AI and in many ways everyday -- it's right on your phone and in your smart speakers and you're probably a part of the datasets being analysed by many algorithms for different purposes. If you want to remind yourself of the speed of AI, play a song and just ask Google or Shazam to identity it.

An Echo Dot owner claims that Amazon's Alexa assistant has started calling him a's*******' whenever he asks the personal assistant to play him music. Micheal Slade, 29, was reportedly shocked when his Echo Dot speaker began to swear at him following his cancellation of his Amazon Prime subscription. The incident has reportedly left Amazon engineers puzzled -- with the tech firm offering Mr Slade gift cards and a year of free Prime membership in compensation. Software is available for the Echo Dot speaker that can make Alexa curse -- but it is unclear whether someone might have deliberately uploaded this to the device. An Echo Dot owner claims that Amazon's Alexa assistant has started calling him a's*******' whenever he asks the personal assistant to play him music Online business owner and Cwmbran, South Wales resident Michael Slade, 29, said that the trouble began the day after called Amazon to cancel his subscription to their Prime subscription service.

Amazon could go head-to-head with Apple and launch its own pair of wireless headphones. The e-commerce giant is in the process of developing earbuds with its AI Alexa assistant built into them, Bloomberg reported, citing sources close to the situation. The product could possibly hit the shelves as soon as later this year. Amazon could go head-to-head with Apple and launch its own pair of wireless headphones. Amazon's earbuds will appear similar to Apple's AirPods, except they'll feature better audio quality and will be offered at a cheaper price point than the iPhone maker's version, Bloomberg said.

Qualcomm executives called the new Asus Lyra Voice a model for routers going forward: partly a speaker, partly a router, and powered by Amazon's Alexa assistant. The company said it's trying to convince ISPs like Cox and Comcast to move in that direction. Unlike AMD and Intel, you can't buy Qualcomm chips to build your own smartphones and routers. But when company executives take the stage at CES to describe how future products should look, it's worth paying attention. Qualcomm announced three versions of its Smart Audio Platform--complete with a quad-core ARM A53 processor, audio DSP, 802.11ac

Amazon may be adding a new feature to its Echo products that would improve the experience and take on classic speaker systems. The company is reportedly launching multi-room audio, which would allow users with multiple Echo products to play music or any other audio simultaneously in multiple rooms. This would allow users to keep listening as they walk around their homes. Amazon is reportedly launching multi-room audio, which would allow users with multiple Echo products to play music or any other audio simultaneously in multiple rooms. Amazon Echo is a voice-controlled smart speaker that works alongside a smartphone app.

Smart locks from Schlage and other manufacturers can now be controlled with your voice via Amazon's Alexa. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. Our picks and opinions are independent from any business incentives. With new smart lock compatibility, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant is slowly taking over your home. What started with lights and thermostats evolved into today's announcement that Alexa will soon be able to unlock your front door with a simple voice command.

If voice assistants really are the next big user interface, then Amazon is off to fantastic start -- by the numbers, at least. As this chart from Statista shows, Amazon's Alexa assistant now has more than 10,000 "skills" (i.e., third-party voice-enabled applications). That's double the amount that was available just last quarter. To be clear: That developers are interested in Alexa is good news for Amazon, and Alexa itself seems to be well ahead in the home compared to rivals like Google Assistant, the AI found in the Google Home speaker that competes directly with the Alexa-centric Amazon Echo. Calling up an Uber or ordering a pizza just by yelling across the room is convenient enough, but for every useful skill, there are 500 CorkOrnaments.com

Amazon Lex is the tech that powers Alexa, which is used in the Amazon Echo (above) and Fire TV. With the rise of personal assistant chatbots, the tools required for organizations to build their own assistants are being moved to the cloud to give developers the ability to leverage these technologies in their products. Foremost among these tools is Amazon Lex, the speech recognition and natural language processing technology that powers the Alexa virtual assistant, used in the Amazon Echo speaker and Fire TV digital media player. TechRepublic's smart person's guide to Amazon Lex is an introduction to the language processing technology. This "living" guide will be updated periodically as further integrations are released.