Amazon wants its Fire TV Cube to become a central part of your home, and not just for entertainment purposes. To show off its usefulness, the company is extended Alexa Announcement compatibility to the streaming media box. The one-way intercom style feature allows you to communicate with other Alexa-powered devices throughout their home.
Here’s how the Alexa Announcements feature works on the Fire TV Cube: All you have to do is trigger Alexa and give it something to broadcast by telling it to announce something. For example, say “Alexa, announce the movie is about to start.” From there, Alexa will rely the message to all of the Alexa-enabled devices connected to your account. Other Alexa speakers will play the message “The movie is about to start” in any room that they are located. It’s a perfect tool for quickly delivering a message to every member of your household. The command also working with the trigger “Alexa, tell everyone” or “Alexa, broadcast” followed by your message of choice.
In addition to working as an intercom for the rest of your home, the Amazon Fire TV Cube will also be able to receive notifications from other devices throughout your home and provide you with that information. If you have smart devices installed in your home, you can connect it with Alexa and have certain actions provide an announcement over the Fire TV cube. Say you have a smart doorbell at your front door, if it detects motion, it can tell Alexa to broadcast that via the Fire TV Cube. While you’re watching your programming, you will receive an announcement that someone is at the door. You can then tell Alexa to show you a feed of your front door if you want to check out who is outside.
Support for the Alexa Announcement feature on Amazon Fire TV Cube is available to all customers located in the United States. You can customize what types of announcements your Fire TV Cube receives and what Alexa devices will broadcast your announcements by managing the Alexa Announcements feature through the Alexa app on your smartphone.
Few things ruin a quiet evening faster than a robot vacuum roaring through the living room. Most of us end up pausing the cleaning run, which defeats the whole purpose of owning one. Matic thinks it has the answer with its new Serene robot vacuum, and the big selling point is how little noise it makes.
The Matic Serene runs at 52 decibels even when cleaning at full power. To put that in perspective, Matic compares it to the hum of your refrigerator. It is available now for $1,695, which is $200 more than the original Matic’s current price.
Outdoor security cameras are not always practical if you live in an apartment or rental. Drilling into an exterior wall may be off-limits, while pointing a regular indoor camera through a window can create another problem once reflections start showing up after dark.
Baseus is trying to solve both issues with the new PrimeSentinel W1, a $69.99 security camera designed specifically to monitor the outdoors through glass. It mounts directly to a window without drilling and uses a 4K Starlight sensor with an F1.0 aperture for full-color monitoring during the day and at night.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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