Amazon is slowly expanding the fleet of devices compatible with its Alexa digital assistant, and it now appears that Taiwanese device manufacturer Acer is ready to say ‘Hi Alexa.’
According to Acer, the digital assistant will make its way to “select Aspire, Spin, Switch and Swift notebooks” starting in 2018. Alexa will also come to Acer’s Aspire all-in-one desktops.
“With industry-leading audio technology across our portfolio, we’re providing customers the possibility to interact with multiple voice services on their notebook or desktop,” said Jerry Kao, Acer’s president of IT products business, in a January 8th, 2018 media release. “Alexa lets users do thousands of things and we’re now bringing those capabilities natively to PCs.”
Acer says that its Aspire 5, Aspire 7, Spin 3, Spin 5, Swift 3, Swift 5, Swift 7 (and Swift 7 Black Edition), Aspire Z24, Aspire U27 and Aspire S24 computers will all carry support for Amazon’s digital assistant.
While this is great news for fans of Acer computers, the bigger news is that Amazon is ready to start integrating its digital assistant into proper personal computers — and not just smartspeakers and smartphones.
“Hands-free access to Alexa on PCs can be helpful to customers in many ways, like making it simple to interact with your smart home, get news or weather, set timers and more,” said Steve Rabuchin, vice president of Amazon Alexa, in the same release. “This is a big step toward making Alexa available wherever customers might need her.”
It will be interesting to see how Alexa manages to compete with Cortana — Microsoft’s digital assistant that is built into every Windows 10 computer anyway.
Source: Acer
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