Take Amazon Alexa with you on the road -- with iOttie's new Easy One Touch Connect smartphone car mount.

Get access to Amazon Alexa and its 70,000+ Alexa Skills with the iOttie Easy One Touch Connect smartphone car mount.

The Easy One Touch Connect smartphone car mount features dual-microphones and noise-canceling software that works to filter out ambient road noises. Powering this is an Apollo 2 Blue MCU with ARM Cortex-M4 processor.

Using Amazon Alexa, you can get access to everything at home using an Echo or Dot, including the ability to play music, make hands-free calls, and much more, as well as travel-specific features such as driving directions, delays, and so on.

To make attaching and removing the smartphone easy, the mount features iOttie's Easy One Touch mechanism, which enables users to easily lock and remove their smartphone with one hand. And to prevent damage from rattling and bouncing while on the road, there is built-in shock-absorbing technology.

For those worried about privacy, you can disable the microphones with a single tap of the mute button.

"We want to make Alexa available to more customers in the car, and that means creating the tools for device makers like iOttie to embed Alexa directly into their automotive products," said Ned Curic, VP of Alexa Auto at Amazon. "The Easy One Touch Connect enhances the driving experience by providing a simple, intuitive phone mount with secure mounting capabilities, and with Alexa built-in, drivers can enjoy hands-free access to many of their favorite Alexa features – all while keeping their hands on the wheel and eyes on the road."

No pricing or release schedule has been announced at the time of publishing.



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Alexa is down for Christmas in the UK and parts of Europe

The Amazon Alexa voice assistant is down in the UK, Germany, and other parts of Europe, according to reports from multiple users on Christmas morning.

This is a problem, as millions of people unwrap Amazon Echo speakers for Christmas around the world, and Amazon's Alexa AI is what powers these smart speakers.

There are outage spikes for Christmas morning if you look at Down Detector, and the heat map for Alexa being down focused on the UK and Germany.

Some users are now reporting that Alexa is beginning to come online for them, while others are experiencing limited functionality. In other words, stick with it.

Is Alexa down in the US and elsewhere?

The US doesn't appear to be affected right now by the same Amazon Alexa outage, at least not yet. We tested it this morning to make sure.

However, as more users unwrap, unbox, and set up Alexa-powered speakers, that always could change. We'll keep monitoring the outage situation in the US.

The Amazon Echo Dot was Amazon's most popular gift in the lead up to the holidays. It's clearly going to strain its massive servers this morning.



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Speak softly and she’ll whisper right back

Artificially-intelligent digital assistants like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant are slowly but surely taking over the world, appearing in myriad devices ranging from phones to speakers to TVs to cars and, as of last week, even kitchen appliances like microwaves.

If you’re a frequent user of any of the above assistance, though, there’s likely one feature you'll have wished for at various times and in certain situations – the ability for them to be a bit more discrete.

Today, Amazon's provided more details on its plans to address that need by enhancing Alexa's ability to understand whispered speech. The upcoming feature, which was first announced last week alongside the company’s range of new Echo devices, means that when Alexa detects a user whispering, the assistant will automatically voice replies in a lower volume, hushed tone too.

The feature is coming to the US market first and will be available beginning in October.

Learning to listen

According to Zeynab Raeesy, a speech scientist working on Amazon’s Alexa Speech team, “Whispered speech is predominantly unvoiced, meaning that it doesn’t involve the vibration of the vocal cords, and it has less energy in lower frequency bands than ordinary speech.”

That meant that to enable the new capabilities, the team had to make adjustments to the way sound was processed after being captured, and they’re planning to present a paper on their findings at the IEEE Workshop on Spoken Language Technology in December.

With Google, Amazon and Apple all hoping that voice assistants will be a huge market for growth, adding whisper support to speech recognition technologies makes a lot of sense. It gives users the ability to use assistants more discretely and should, theoretically, help people feel more comfortable about using voice control in a much wider range of environments – like when you’re out in public, at the office or school, or perhaps just trying to avoid waking up that sleeping kitty on your lap.

These are the best Alexa Skills and commands

Sweet nothings

Of course, better contextual awareness also has the potential to make AI assistants seem a bit more human, too – although whether you see that as a pro or con will probably depend on your general feeling towards this burgeoning age of artificial intelligence.

I for one welcome our new digital overlords and am fondly looking forward to the day when I can sneak out of bed for a midnight snack, and quietly whisper "Alexa, warm up this slice of chocolate cake” to the microwave while my family remains blissfully none-the-wiser. What a beautiful age we live in.


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