AWS extends Alexa voice controls to low-powered devices

To the delight of third-party developers, Amazon's Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) has decided to bring Alexa voice control capabilities to low-powered devices.

Currently, Alexa Voice Service (AVS) has a minimum requirement of at least 100MB of on-device RAM and an ARM Cortex "A" class microprocessor, reports SiliconANGLE.

Amazon is also expanding the capabilities of itsAAWS IoT Greengrass service, which extends AWS functions to connected devices.

"When you know the state of your physical assets, you can solve a lot of things," AWS Vice President of IoT Dirk Didascalou told SiliconANGLE.

"You can also create a lot of new services. A lot of our customers have this need," he added.

To cut back on costs, Amazon is transferring tasks such as processing requirements, retrieving, buffering, decoding and mixing audio on devices to the cloud, making voice control, and potentially biometrics, possible even for light switches, the report added.

AWS customers can also create their own machine learning image analysis thanks to a new feature added to Amazon Rekognition called Amazon Rekognition Custom Labels, available from December 3.

AWS is also introducing more connectivity and control services to make life easier for IoT developers.

These include Fleet Provisioning for AWS IoT Core, which makes it simpler to onboard a wide range of connected products, be it vacuum cleaners or construction excavators, the report mentioned.

AWS is set to kick off its flagship annual re: Invent conference here from Dec 2.