Good morning, everybody. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. And I don’t know how much you know about the Amazon Alexa and the whole version or environment. There were some big announcements announced by Amazon in the last little while. We spent a little bit of time talking about them. And some of the things you can do with this new smart home assistant software, and some of the things you might want to do and maybe some of the things you don’t want to do. So here we go with Jim.
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Alexa, Now A Truly Useful Smart Assistant
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Automated Machine Generated Transcript:
Craig
Good morning, everybody. Craig Peters on here. I was on with Mr. Jim Polito this morning. And I don’t know how much you know about the Amazon Alexa and the whole on version or environment depending on how you want to pronounce it. But there is some big announcements coming out of Amazon just a couple of weeks ago. So we spent a little bit of time talking about them. And some of the things you can do with this new smart home assistant software, and some of the things you might want to do and maybe some of the things you don’t want to do. So here we go with Jim.
Jim
If you have an Amazon electric you may want to just, you know, get ready for her to go crazy. Yeah, she’s she’s gonna go a little crazy because we’re going to sing her name over and over again. But there’s a lot of things she can do for you, not the bad stuff. There’s a lot of things she can do for you. That a great that you don’t even know about but you know who knows about it. The genius, Our Tech Talk Guru Craig Peterson. Good morning, sir.
Craig
Hey, good morning, Jim.
Jim
So I’ve been teasing this all morning. And I know every time I say Alexa know, everybody’s which isn’t good, because people who are listening through a smart speaker which you can listen to this show through someone’s finger, every time I say that, it stops playing and she starts listening. So maybe we should come up with a different name for her while we talk about her behind her back.
Craig
You could do that. Yeah, absolutely. Can I actually use my Alexa to listen to you in the morning? Yeah. Which is great. I do. I’m fascinated. Every day. I get people send me emails. They say Jim, I’ve got one in the bathroom. And one in the kitchen. Michael, what? Right? And you know why I don’t even have one. Talk about being in the Yeah, I mean, a large portion of this audience listens to the show.
Jim
Through Alexa or through another smart speaker and and the guy doing the show doesn’t even own one.
Craig
Well, first off, if you’re if you have one of these Amazon echo’s, these Alexa devices, the first thing to do if you’re listening to Jim is change its name. So, here’s the trick, Alexa will actually respond to either you can say Alexa and it will wake up, or you can go into your app that you have for your Alexa and you can change its name now it will respond to one of three names. You can either call it Alexa, you can call it Echo, or you can be like john Luc Picard and call it computer and it will respond.
Jim
Yeah, that was the Star Star Trek. Little reference there. For those of us who are geeks
Craig
Yeah, exactly. It’s although there’s a couple of things that I have it do, by the way, it has these, these little apps, if you will, that you can run on the echo devices on these Amazon devices. And you can actually program them quite simply my wife who is anything but a programmer has done this as well. And one of them is red alert. So if I, if I tell it that there’s a red alert, I’m not going to say the name in front of it, because I don’t want them all going on, right. But it can, it can learn to do things. So it starts playing the whole Red Alert thing from Star Trek and lights flashing. So that ties that ties into one of the things you had been talking about a little bit earlier. And that is that they had a big announcement, a whole set of them. Amazon has their big yearly announcements about a week or two after Apple has theirs. And so they were up on the stage one of their big announcements is that they’re going to be able to allow you to
have some some names, kind a ounds like, we’re going to have a committee to study whether or not we are going to have a committee that’s going to investigate sensuality of impeaching President Trump. Yeah. So Samuel Jackson’s voice is going to be available on the Alexa. But they’re going to do something interesting with this. Jim, we’ve talked so many times about this new deep fake stuff. They’re going to deep fake Samuel Jackson’s voice.
Jim
Oh, so that we talked about this, how dangerous this can be that they could take my image and have me saying something or doing something illegal or whatever, and that that technology is going to be available to the average person, but it’s already available to the high tech people. So so they’re going to take the tone of Samuel L. Jackson’s voice and they’re going to say things even though he’s not saying it to say those things exactly. So you can boys that’s gotta be I’ll tell you what I’ll bet that’s a big payday for Samuel L Jackson.
Craig
It is because they brought him in studio when he recorded a bunch of stuff but historically what happened with Sherry and and many of these others over the years is a record someone singing almost everything that anyone has ever said. So they’ve given us a minimum of 5000 word vocabulary typically, oh Samuel L. Jackson is going to be way too expensive to have them have them say every word in the English language that is likely to want to do so
Jim
Yeah
Craig
Deep fakes to go into abound on your Alexa. So that’s number two. He’s number one, he’s going to be the first one. Another thing that I am using that I get I just found out about myself because Amazon upgraded it is something called Alexa guard. Now we all know that the Alexa sits there listening. Okay all of the time.
Jim
That’s why she’s not in the house right now, cuz she’d be listening all the time. But go ahead.
Craig
Yeah. And that’s a little bit unnerving, frankly. So Amazon has some technology in it to make it so that if even if it’s hacked, you’ll notice the light will come on if it’s starting to record. So there’s a difference between listening and recording. But with Alexa guard, what’s going to happen or what happens right now is it listens for Windows breaking or alarms, like carbon dioxide, alarms, fire alarms, any kind of alarm that you have, and it also ties into some of the Home Alarm Systems. So if you have the ring, if you have a couple of others, it’ll tie into that so here’s what happened. It hears someone walking around. Yeah, that’s that’s fine, right?
Craig
Probably going to learn about footsteps is probably going to be able to learn that there’s a dog barking or something else is going on. But right now it’s just alarms and window breaks. And what it’ll do is it will basically call you up.
Jim
Oh.
Craig
It calls you. You have the app on your smartphone, and it says, Hey, I heard something and then it’ll play the recording of what it heard to you. That’s pretty good. That’s really cool.
Jim
Yeah, so broke broken glass. It hears that it records it and then it calls me up. Now that’s, that’s a didn’t know that’s without having to pay for an additional alarm system for your home.
Craig
It comes with it. And right now you can get some of the older models of the Alexa for as little as 20 bucks.
Jim
Wow.
Craig
So there you go. Now you’ve got a basic alarm system. It’s also by the way, got an auto delete now. Cuz I know that you’ve been concerned you don’t have one of a does record they do go to the cloud. Everybody does this, Microsoft does it with Cortana. And Apple does it, but it goes and then they’re reviewed to see how accurate was their understanding of what you said. They now have an auto delete feature in the Amazon Echo universe. And it allows you to have your voice automatically your recordings automatically deleted every three months or every 18 months. You can also tell Alexa to delete what I just said or delete everything I’ve said today. So it’s got a lot of nice little features in it. It also has Food Network features and if you have the echo show which is the one that has the screen on it, you probably notice this because it keeps adjusting recipes for you but this is going to tie in to book a cooking classes from Bobby Flay, which is really kind of cool, you can ask a question it’ll tie into your shopping list that I Amazon will take for you that you can use in the grocery store other places, you can ask it So, okay, so let’s show me that chicken recipe. And then later on you can go back to it and say how many chicken sighs or what I supposed to use or buy, right? You can tell to save the recipe. It’s got new stuff for kids as well and read them stories and have some simple games and other activities. Alex her back is available on your Alexa Wow, you can have your own little game yeah, you’re a little game and answer the question within question answer. I don’t know how he does it. In the form of a question answer in the form of Yeah, there you go. Yeah, so you answer the question with a question. Wi Fi controller. It has hunches. And that feature is going to be a nap or not announced, but I’m going to come in very, very soon. So the can perform different actions together. So, for instance, we talked a minute ago about the Alexa guard, so you can have it so as Alexa detects something that thinks might be a smashed window and alarm going off. You can have it automatically turn on lights and under your house, you can say hey, Alexa, I’m leaving now. And with hunches, it’ll mimic you the way you normally use your lights and and your radio and listening to Jim Polito in the morning. It will mimic all of that as though you are at home. So a lot of really cool features. We have three or four of them in the house these Alexa everything from the dot through the show. Yeah, the kids have them. And I’ve kind of fallen in love. These things are very, very handy.
Jim
Well, look, we can find out more. I mean, Craig just scratched the surface. Plus he’s got a lot of other information. And all you have to do to get it is text my name, Jim to this number
Craig
855-385-5553. So just text a Jim to 855-385-5553
Jim
Standard data and tax rates apply. But you’ll get all this great information and you’ll get much more Craig will not bother you. He will not pester you. He will not hack you, Craig. Thanks so much, buddy. We’ll talk with you next week.
Craig
All right. Take care, Jim. Bye-bye.
Jim
All right, a very important final word. When we return you’re listening to the
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