AI smart speakers are very useful tools to have around the house as long as you don’t mind the privacy trade-offs and you take care when letting young children interact with them. Amazon, however, has just announced an incredibly new feature for some of its Alexa speakers that will give them a real advantage over other competitors from the likes of Google and Apple. The retail giant has announced that soon some Alexa smart assistant speakers will be able to boost your Wi-Fi signal around your home. Here is what you need to know.
At the recent Amazon Launch Event, the company announced that the latest generation of Amazon Echo and Echo Dot Smart speakers (the fifth generation if you are counting), as well as the current and fourth generation speakers will be able to boost your home Wi-Fi signal as a part of the Amazon Eero mesh Wi-Fi system.
The caveat then attached to this exciting news is that for the Echo speakers to boost your home Wi-Fi you will need to have already set up the Eero mesh Wi-Fi system, which means you need to buy extra hardware to make it work. Mesh Wi-Fi systems tend to be much more effective than standard Wi-Fi extenders as they integrate with the system’s router to ensure better and more even coverage across the reach of the network.
This looks like a very clever move by Amazon as it offers households who have Echo smart speakers in their home a much cheaper way to build out a larger mesh Wi-Fi network in their home. The hardware is relatively expensive for these types of Wi-Fi extender networks so being able to augment the offering using hardware you already own will likely be attractive to users who often struggle with their Wi-Fi signal.
In other recent AI news, did you know that Meta has just handed over the governance of a major AI framework to the Linux Foundation?
