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Amazon Pantry, the company’s daily essentials store for Prime members, is back online and is accepting orders in a few cities after temporarily shutting down last week due to the lockdown. It is now serviceable in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune for select pincodes. Pantry offers essentials including food, beverages, household supplies, health and beauty products at discounted rates. “We are prioritising deliveries of existing orders. Deliveries of new orders could take 7-10 days,” said the e-commerce company. Amazon Pantry was delivering essentials in over 100 cities across India before suspending services temporarily when the country entered the 21-day lockdown to contain the spread of Covid-19. Read complete Article

Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software to play games, find music or trawl for trivia. Millions more are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of concern that someone might be listening. Sometimes, someone is. Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands. The Alexa voice review process, described by seven people who have worked on the program, highlights the often-overlooked human role in training software algorithms. In marketing materials Amazon says Alexa “lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter.” But like many softwa...

Earlier this year, cricketer Sourav Ganguly joined LinkedIn as an influencer, following peers such as Sachin Tendulkar, who had taken the step last year. Ganguly and Tendulkar though were not the only ones to go down that road. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, industrialists Bill Gates and Richard Branson, Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra and Canadian PM Justin Trudeau are some names, who are part of the LinkedIn influencers club. While brands and endorsers have enjoyed a fruitful relationship for most part, a new trend of seeking multiple voices is growing. Instead of one endorser, ... Readmore

Amazon.com said a series of miscues picked up by one of its voice-activated Echo speakers during an Oregon couple’s private conversation resulted in the chat being recorded and sent to one of their acquaintances without their knowledge. The tech company responded Wednesday to a KIRO 7 news report that the pair got a phone call recently from the acquaintance, one of the husband’s employees, saying “unplug your Alexa devices right now. You’re being hacked.” The Portland couple used Amazon’s voice-activated devices throughout their home to control heat, lights and security, according to the news report. ALSO READ : Alexa gets screen: Amazon Echo Spot a good introduction to smart assistants Amazon explained the series of events that triggered the episode in an emailed statement. The Echo woke after hearing a word in the couple’s conversation that sounded like “Alexa” — the usual trigger to begin recording. The speaker later heard “send message” during the conversation, at whi...

As it marks its entry into the premium-affordable housing segment, Bengaluru-based real estate giant Embassy Group is turning to technology to woo customers in an effort to offer a truly differentiated experience from its rivals. The company is dabbling with the idea of smart homes and has roped in Amazon to fit every apartment in its upcoming Embassy Edge project in North Bengaluru with Echo smart speakers and accompanying smart devices. Homeowners will be able to control lights and appliances with their voice and will even be able to remotely monitor their homes through Amazon ’s service. The project will have a little over 800 homes and will be completed in the next four years. “ Being the first in real estate to bring this integration of voice-enabled homes in India, we believe that this will revolutionize the residential sector. We will be replicating this concept in our other residential projects across micro markets,” said Jitu Virwani, Chairman and Managing Dir...

Many people have grown accustomed to talking to their smart devices, asking them to read a text, play a song or set an alarm. But someone else might be secretly talking to them, too. Over the past two years, researchers in China and the United States have begun demonstrating that they can send hidden commands that are undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon ’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant. Inside university labs, the researchers have been able to secretly activate the artificial intelligence systems on smartphones and smart speakers, making them dial phone numbers or open websites. In the wrong hands, the technology could be used to unlock doors, wire money or buy stuff online — simply with music playing over the radio. A group of students from University of California, Berkeley and Georgetown University showed in 2016 that they could hide commands in white noise played over loudspeakers and through YouTube videos to get smart devices to turn on airplane mode or o...