In late August, the company announced that the band will use your smartphone camera to capture a 3D scan of your body and then calculate your body fat. Another eyebrow-raising tool – the Tone feature – uses a microphone on the band to listen to the tone of your voice and report back on your emotional state throughout the day. Residents in these apartment complexes will be able to set timers and alarms, get the weather, or hear the news from the Echo device in their apartment by using their voice. Alexa for Residential also allows property managers to offer custom voice experiences that “go beyond the walls of their apartments”. Property managers can create “custom Alexa skills” for every unit in a property – in other words, Alexa will be the middleman between residents and landlords on things like managing rent and any maintenance requests. And, if you want to remove even more human contact from your property experience, landlords can also use Alexa-enabled devices in vacant apartments to answer common questions, carry out self-guided tours, or demo smart home features available in each apartment. So, to summarize, Alexa could be your next landlord. So, are there any other border-line creepy developments on the horizon? Well, in the short-term, the company seems to be focusing on new ways that it can make the user experience more fluid with Alexa. As for the long-run, it looks like a full-blown sci-fi movie might be on the cards. One way Alexa could become more efficient is if it has more of a physical presence in our homes. Yes, that’s right – a real-life Alexa robot. The vice president and head scientist at Alexa Artificial Intelligence, Rohit Prasad, revealed at the MIT Technology Review’s EmTech Digital AI conference this year that he thinks Alexa would be better if it had a robot body and cameras. “The only way to make smart assistants really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world.” According to Prasad, giving smart assistants physical bodies could enable them to learn more about your routines, how you move around your home, and where other bits of technology are situated in your house. One of the patents even outlines a feedback system that would vibrate against the wearer’s skin to point their hand in the right direction. The result? Workers can meet higher demands in the warehouses.
