More chores for Amazon's Alexa, and a new (celebrity) voice

Amazon unveiled a lineup of new Alexa-powered products on Wednesday extending from homes and cars to wearable devices, and a celebrity voice option for the popular digital assistant.

Alexa has been tweaked using machine learning to speak more like a person, and will offer celebrity voices -- with the first being star actor Samuel L. Jackson.

In a product launch in Seattle, Washington, Alexa was the star as Amazon sought to widen the reach of its digital assistant powered by artificial intelligence amid a battle with rivals from Google, Apple, Microsoft and others.

Amazon began rolling out bilingual capabilities for Alexa, enabling it to perform in Spanish as well as English in the US; French along with English in Canada, and Hindi along with English in india, according to vice president of devices and services Dave Limp.

The celebrity voice option from Amazon follows a similar move by Google, which gave users the option of hearing celebrity singer John Legend on the Google Assistant last year.

Along with beefing up the Echo and Ring lines, Amazon introduced earbuds it touted as providing the first wearable, hands-free Alexa experience on the go. The $130 wearable devices will work with Google or Apple smart assistant software already on smartphones, according to Limp.

The Amazon voice assistant was also infused prototype eyeglass frames on display at the media event along with an enhanced array of Echo smart speakers.

"Amazon just took a giant leap ahead of Google in the home," Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Patrick Moorhead said.

"It's not just the Amazon products, it is the more than 80,000 'Made for Alexa' products offered by partners."
"If you invite an always-listening, cloud-driven artificial intelligence into your life, you are going to encounter some privacy issues," said Techsponential analyst Avi Greengart "It's Amazon's responsibility to mitigate them as much as they can; it was good to see some of the initiatives they rolled out."