Amazon Advances Alexa Accessibility With Eye Gaze, Call Translation
Amazon on Wednesday introduced new Alexa features geared toward making its devices and services accessible to more customers. The announcements came during its fall hardware event, which also brought new products such as Ring and Blink cameras and a Fire TV Soundbar.
One new feature is Eye Gaze on Alexa, which allows customers with mobility or speech disabilities to use Alexa with their eyes. People will be able to gaze at their tablet to perform pre-set Alexa actions such as controlling their smart home, playing shows and music and making calls. It’ll be available later this year on the Fire Max 11 Tablet at no extra cost, according to the company.
Amazon also spotlighted Call Translation, a feature launching to Echo Show and Alexa mobile app customers in the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Germany, France, Italy and Spain later this year. Call Translation allows customers to have their Alexa calls automatically translated through on-screen captions in over 10 languages including English, French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.
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“This helps all of our customers communicate more easily whether they identify as deaf or hard of hearing, or have multilingual families,” said Heather Zorn, vice president of Alexa, during the event.
Source: CNET