After the Amazon Echo speaker, Amazon Fire tablets are also getting the Alexa Voice Assistant. On Wednesday, retail behemoth Amazon announced that Alexa, its intelligence voice assistant, will debut on the new Fire HD 8 tablet and the rest of Amazon’s tablet before the end of 2016. Alexa on Fire tablets works much like Apple’s Siri on IOS devices.
The Fire tablet will offer full-screen cards with additional details. There’s a new feature which coming to Amazon Tablets, in the form of information cards. When you ask for the weather, Alexa will show the current temperature and offer the day’s forecast in the form of card, means the card will pop up on the tablet’s display. The difference is that now you won’t hear the answer you will see too. Through visual cards, users can get the news read out to them or listen to music from services such as Amazon Music or Pandora, the cards also offers the playback control such as pausing and skipping.
Unlike the Amazon Echo speaker which you can shout to call up Alexa, on Fire tablets you just simply hold down on the Home button for a second to launch Alexa and you will see the blue strip that’s lights up which shows Alexa is activated and you can ask Alexa anything you would ask it.
Alexa focuses on tasks typically done at home, such as entertainment, recipes and timers. For tasks on to go, such as finding nearby restaurants, Alexa will also perform a standard web search or directs you to Alexa app.
Amazon says that any of the 3,000+ skills that work with the Echo speakers will also work on the Fire tablets. Alexa arrives on Fire Tablets on this week, Amazon is rolling out a free over the air software update that will install Alexa on Amazon’s Fire Tablets $49.