Among Alexa’s more than 12,000 abilities are a cavalcade of ways for Amazon’s digital assistant to control the house, like turning lights on and off.
But GE Lighting is going a step further with its C by GE Sol LED table lamp that comes with Alexa inside. GE announced several new features for the $200 lamp this week and said it is planning to release the product in September.
The lamp can do everything Alexa is capable of — play music, order delivery, set a timer — but it also has a few signature features of its own. It will be able to pair lighting effects with cues from Alexa, such as a flashing light when a timer goes off, and it will be able to toggle the hue of the light during night and day to be more friendly with sleep schedules.
GE said it is opening up a pre-order program, where fans of the product can sign up now and get 20 percent off and first crack at the lamp when it goes on sale.
Alexa has been the early leader in the voice assistant market, and now Amazon is following up on a goal of putting Alexa pretty much everywhere. One way it is doing that is by opening up what amounts to Alexa’s ears, her 7-Mic Voice Processing Technology, to third party hardware makers who want to build the digital brain into their devices. This quarter, Amazon opened up Amazon Lex, the artificial intelligence technology that powers Alexa to developers.
Opening up the brain of the digital assistant has played in a big role in Amazon’s ascension to the top of the market. Alexa Voice Service lets manufacturers integrate Alexa into their products. The Alexa Skills Kit encourages third-party developers to build skills for Alexa. Developers who want to add to Alexa’s abilities can write code that works with Alexa in the cloud, letting the smart assistant do the heavy lifting of understanding and deciphering spoken commands.
