A Dash of Alexa

Image from VentureBeat

Adding Alexa supported to the Dash makes sense. A few years ago, when the Dash originally came out, we had been initially relieved that the wand was the reason that Amazon bought all those voice companies (of course, that was wrong).

Updating the Dash to add Alexa seems more of a consolidation of voice applications. The Dash voice capability, detached of Alexa, doesn’t make much sense to support.

With AVS, the Dash can now act as a smart home voice remote. Anything connected to Alexa can be controlled.

Some things that could enhance the interaction with the wand are:

1. Having hands free capability (maybe in the 1–2 m range from the device).
2. Wake-up from accelerometer data.
3. The addition of a screen to see latest purchases (turning it into a home re-ordering device).
4. Giving incentives to drive its use. Why not a discount if people order through the device?
5. Mic array. Maybe the mic on the wand could be used to model the acoustics of the home? This could inform some cloud-based DSP algorithm for better speech recognition.