Amazon finally launched Alexa Together yesterday, December 7. Unfortunately, Alexa Together was launched in the midst of the Amazon Web Services outage.
Alexa Together is a new subscription service from Amazon that builds on the existing Alexa Care Hub to provide a less intrusive way to use Amazon's voice assistant and accompanying Echo speakers to both assist and maintain tabs on an aging loved one or other person who requires care.
Since Alexa's inception, resourceful families have utilized modern ways to have the artificially intelligent assistant assist them in caring for a loved one who lives far away.
Amazon's Alexa Care Hub
Electronically popping in on an elderly family member to check on them and sharing Alexa accounts so they can see their activity have been simple ways to ensure that your close relative is safe, particularly if they aren't always excellent at answering the phone.
However, because the technology wasn't developed for that case, it's a little intrusive for the individual being monitored virtually.
With that, Amazon decided to create products centered around monitoring elderly loved ones from afar.
The first product was Alexa Care Hub, and now, Alexa Together has been launched.
Amazon Alexa Together
Alexa Together will replace the previous free Alexa Care Hub.
As reported by The Verge, Alexa Together's price will be $19.99 per month or $199 per year.
With that subscription, customers get a professional monitoring service as well as some extra proactive features for the new charge.
Urgent Response and fall detection are the two most notable features coming with Alexa Together. This offers hands-free access to a professional emergency hotline 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by just saying "Alexa, call for help" to an Echo speaker and being linked with an agent.
Alexa Together's Fall Detection Feature
Currently, fall detection requires third-party hardware; it works with Assistive Technology Services (ATS) and Vayyar devices.
Vayyar Care, a wall-mounted device from the manufacturers of Vayyar Home, costs $250.
It employs sensors and radio waves to detect falls and is specific to Alexa Together.
The SkyAngelCare by ATS is a fall-detection pendant that connects to Alexa through Wi-Fi.
Alexa Together's Urgent Response Feature
According to TechCrunch, these devices can be programmed to ask Alexa whether the user wants to call Urgent Response, which is a more proactive approach than waiting for the user to ask for assistance.
There are no continuing membership fees for using these devices, unlike similar products on the market today.
Alexa Together's Remote Assist Feature
Alexa Together also has a new Remote Assist feature.
This gives a caregiver direct access to a person's Alexa account with their permission, allowing them to help set up features like setting reminders, adding contacts to call or message with their voice, adding items to a shopping list, and linking music and video services.
Finally, a new feature is the ability to add additional carers, which will be available early next year.
What Caused Amazon Outage?
In related news, the Amazon Web Services is the world's largest cloud computing service company, and recently, an outage caused issues for many of its clients, just as the companh was releasing Alexa Together.
AWS allows clients to rent data storage and processing capabilities via the internet rather than maintaining their own data centers.
However, the Amazon outage affected numerous software during the outage as AWS owns 40.8% of the global market for cloud services.
According to Tom's Guide, Amazon stated that the outage is caused by multiple AWS APIs in the US-EAST-1 Region.
This problem is also affecting some of Amazon's monitoring and incident response software, causing delays in providing updates. Amazon has figured out what's causing the problem and is working to fix it fully.
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