Amazon's Echo Show devices now support simple hand gestures for input.
Update 12/13: Clarified details of the reports on Alexa being a money-loser.
Amazon has announced three new features—Gestures, Text-to-Speech, and Consolidated Captions—coming to its Echo Show devices. The Seattle-homed company announced the additions in a blog post published on Tuesday.
“Since the launch of the original Echo Show [smart display] in 2017, we’ve continued to develop features that make interacting with Alexa more natural. With the addition of a screen, customers have not only been able to ask Alexa for spoken responses, they’ve been able to see the weather forecast, follow along to a recipe, watch videos, make video calls, and check their security cameras and video doorbells,” Amazon wrote in the post’s lede. “Now, we’re excited to introduce three new Alexa features that we hope many Echo Show customers will find useful.”
Amazon illustrated a few use cases for each new function in the post.
According to Amazon, Gestures allow people to use simple hand gestures to control Alexa. It’s now possible to raise your hand, palm facing forward, at the Show’s camera to dismiss a timer, for example. As for Text-to-Speech, it’s an enhancement on top of the existing Tap to Alexa feature whereby one can interact with the digital assistant via touch rather than voice. Users can use Text-to-Speech to “type out phrases and have them spoken out loud via your Echo Show device,” per Amazon. Lastly, the Consolidated Captions software allows users the ability to switch on Alexa’s myriad captioning modes all at once instead of piecemeal.
As Amazon astutely notes, particularly with the Text-to-Speech and Consolidated Captions features, every new feature introduced today has obvious relevance as assistive technologies for people with disabilities. Text-to-Speech can be incredibly helpful to those who have speech delays like a stutter, but can also prove beneficial to someone who is nonverbal altogether. Likewise, Consolidated Captions do a lot of heavy lifting in terms of alleviating cognitive load—as well as fine-motor friction—related to having to remember to turn on, say, Call Captioning and other similar modes. All told, however, every one of the new features from Amazon serve a singular purpose of helping provide a positive, more accessible user experience. This is good for anyone, of course, but is especially impactful for disabled people.
Today’s Alexa news should come as a welcome reprieve to those who rely on Amazon’s doyenne of digital assistants especially for accessibility. A report from Insider emerged last month, citing an anonymous Amazon employee, that the Alexa business is a “colossal failure of imagination,” costing Amazon $10 billion annually and subsequently leading to layoffs within that segment of the organization. However dystopian and dispirited that description may be, the truth of the matter is accessibility is, as usual, an also-ran factor in considering Alexa’s success (or failure). Whether used a little, as I do in the kitchen, or a lot, there should be no denying that Alexa, as a product, has democratized access to things like smart home devices and home theater setups exponentially.
Alexa isn’t going away anytime soon, and this isn’t a eulogy of any sort, but it’s nonetheless key perspective on how Alexa is actually used. Maybe Alexa truly is losing money for Amazon, but in no way should that be seen as the primary source of evidence that the product is an abject failure. It’s true accessibility doesn’t usually live at the forefront of the mainstream consumer consciousness, where Alexa is firmly entrenched. Still, it’s disingenuous to judge Alexa’s viability—past, present, or future—without taking what she does for the disability community into consideration. Accessibility is a credible use case deserving of recognition.
Put another way, using Alexa transcends mere convenience. As I tweeted the other day, most able-bodied people conflate accessibility with convenience; voice-first UIs like Alexa (and her ilk) are indeed convenient and futuristic, but they can be accessible above all else. To wit, it may be convenient to be able to shout across the room and ask the proverbial genie in a bottle to turn on the lights. It’s another matter entirely to ask Alexa to do so because you literally can’t flip the switch.
There are teams across Amazon who see the potential here. In a statement issued in response to the aforementioned reporting, an Amazon spokesperson said in part, “we are as committed as ever to Alexa and will continue to invest heavily in it.” Today’s slew of Echo Show updates serve as a good example of the company putting their money where their mouth is.
