Since its release in 2014, the Amazon Echo has become a vastly popular home smart speaker. With the company’s iconic virtual assistant Alexa powering the device, there’s little it can’t do, from telling you the weather to accidentally ordering bundles of toilet paper. There are likely many things you never knew your Amazon Echo could do, and the small piece of tech just got way more advanced with its latest addition: AI.
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At CES 2024, the mega-corporation took the stage to reveal a new partnership with Character.AI, a chatbot service that uses artificial intelligence to create characters and have a conversation. Utilizing a new skill on the Amazon Alexa Skill Store, users can talk to various bots through their Echo, adding yet another feature you probably didn’t know existed to the smart speaker. Through Character.AI, Echo users can speak to celebrities, historical figures, and fictional characters. Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, and Socrates are just a few of the AI-generated voices you can talk to and even roleplay various adventures. Iconic video game character Mario is also one of the many characters available through the service — though, given Nintendo’s strict policies, we doubt this will be available for long.
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