Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is taking Alexa beyond its Echo and Fire devices.
Acer has announced that Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa will come to a select number of laptops in the first quarter of 2018. The announcement was made during the ongoing Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. These laptops are the Aspire 5, Aspire 7, Spin 3, Spin 5, Switch 7 Black Edition, Swift 3, Swift 5, Swift 7, Aspire Z24, Aspire U27, and Aspire S24.
Some Aspire all-in-one PCs will also get Amazon Alexa support, the company said. Initially available for customers in the US, Alexa support will be available in the first quarter of 2018 via an update through Acer Care Center. Besides a select notebooks, Acer plans to rollout Alexa to the V6820M/i 4K UHD Projector.
“Acer is excited to be among the first brands to bring Alexa to PCs,” said Jerry Kao, President of IT Products Business, Acer. “We’re providing consumers the possibility to interact with multiple voice services on their notebook or desktop”.
Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is taking Alexa beyond its Echo and Fire devices. The company is aggressively pushing the voice activated assistant to as many as devices possible. A lot of traditional PC manufacturers such as Acer, HP, Asus and Lenovo have plans to integrate Alexa into a number of Windows 10-based laptops and desktops. This is not a good news for Microsoft’s Cortana assistant, which comes natively built-in into Windows 10 powered PCs. Just to clarify, the integration is different from to the partnership between Microsoft and Amazon announced last year.