Amazon Fire TV Stick users in the TV will now be able to take advantage of a brand new, time-saving feature.
The retail giant have today rolled out far-field voice control to Fire TV devices in the UK.
In layman terms, this means millions of Fire TV fans can do away with their remotes and control the streaming device hands free.
To do this, they have to pair their Fire TV Stick with an Amazon Echo to take advantage of the Alexa voice assistant.
If you only have one Amazon Fire TV Stick, it will automatically pair with your Echo once you ask Alexa a question that includes the term ‘Fire TV’.
For instance, a command such as “Alexa, watch The Tick on Fire TV” will automatically pair the two devices together.
If you have more than one Fire TV device, you will need to use the Alexa App to pair devices.
Amazon said the Echo and Fire TV Stick combo will let you ask Alexa to search by title, actor or genre.
You’ll also be able to control video playback, such as asking Alexa to pause or rewind, and launch apps all without a remote.
Here are some of the things you can say to control your Fire TV hands-free:
• “Alexa, watch The Big Sick”
• “Alexa, pause”
• “Alexa, fast forward two minutes”
• “Alexa, go back one minute”
• “Alexa, show me dramas with Colin Firth”
• “Alexa, go home”
• “Alexa, open Netflix”
• “Alexa, open UKTV on Fire TV”
• “Alexa, show my front door camera”
Far-field control of Fire TV is now available in the UK on all generations of Fire TV and Fire TV Stick, and can pair with any Echo device.
It’s taken a few months for the feature to reach the UK, with the Alexa integration for Amazon’s streaming devices going live in the US last August.
In other Amazon news, Express.co.uk recently revealed the retail giant are believed to be hard at work on its own AI chipset to power next-gen Echo devices.
Amazon reportedly wants to build its own AI chips for its Echo lineup, including Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Echo Spot, and others.
A custom Amazon chip should allow the smart speaker to better handle speech recognition by processing data locally – rather than sending everything to the cloud first.
With current generation Echo devices, when you ask Alexa a question – she doesn’t understand what you’re asking her.
Instead, the smart assistant simply transcribes the words and sends that data to the cloud, which returns the answer or action you’ve requested.
With integrated chip software, Alexa could understand your request without contacting Amazon’s servers.
The smart assistant might even be able to recall a similar request from earlier in the day or week, and return the right answer.
This reduces the need to ping Amazon’s remote servers and should speed-up the process.
Future silicon designed for Echo hardware could help prevent Alexa data from being hacked, and could even keep Alexa up-and-running should Amazon’s cloud experience an outage.