After infiltrating almost every home, every TV and basically every smart device out there with its Alexa services, Amazon has set it’s sights on the automobile sector. At CES 2019, Amazon announced its collaboration with connected car solutions provider Telenav.
This collab would bring enhanced navigation and voice recognition capabilities to Alexa-based services. In the upcoming Alexa compatible cars, the Telenav program will run in the background to monitor local traffic conditions and let AmazoN do it’s thing at the front.
Amazon started rolling out their services to cars last year itself. But it was limited to only the luxury vehicles such as BMW, Mini, and Rolls Royce. Opening up their services to a larger segment would immensely boost the sales of the cars as well that of Amazon’s. Nowadays, technology is becoming one of the key parameters in decisions to purchase a new car. According to a survey by Autotrader, 87 percent of customers who are planning to purchase a car soon say they intend to research the technology features while shopping for one.
Apart from this, Amazon is also pushing its services to automobiles via their Echo Auto product. It is a battery bank-sized aftermarket echo product for cars. It connects via a USB cable (pairs to your phone via Bluetooth) and has 8 far-field microphones to hear you over the AC, music being blasted through your car speakers, and the usual road noises. It does all the usual Alexa stuff like navigating to places, making lists, making calls, playing music etc. The product was announced initially in September but remained in pre-order status until recently.
We had over a million requests. Now, we’re just starting to ship.
However in spite of registering over a million pre-orders, this $ 25 gadget is still an invitation based product. According to Amazon, the first phase of shipment is already underway and in fact some of the customers received their orders during the holiday season itself
