Amazon’s Alexa is gaining a new feature called Care Hub. The Care Hub gives customers a new, easy way to check in on their loved one remotely, while maintaining privacy, with features like the high-level activity feed and alerts.
It also gives aging customers the comfort of knowing they can just ask Alexa to call for help should they need it. For the feature to work, both the aging member and the family member will have to have Echo or an Alexa-enabled device.
The Care Hub will work once the aging loved one sends an invitation and the family member accepts it. As per Amazon, ‘The family member providing support gets peace of mind through Care Hub alerts and the activity feed in the Alexa app’.
With Care Hub Alerts, the family member will receive notification when their loved one has had their first activity of the day, or get notified if no activity is detected by a certain time, such as 12 p.m. When they’re checking in on the app, they can easily tap to call or Drop In on their loved one.
Amazon says that it has designed Care Hub while keeping privacy in Mind. For example, when checking the activity feed, the family member would be able to see their loved one was using Alexa for entertainment, but not the song or podcast they were listening to or what they said to Alexa.
Emergency Contact is the most important feature of Care Hub. The link between accounts can set the family member as the emergency contact. If help is needed, the loved one can simply say “Alexa, call for help” and Alexa will call, text, and send a push notification to alert the family member.
Inferring Customers Latent Goals
Amazon also introduced a new feature where Alexa will now be able to guess what you want to ask. With the capability to infer latent goals, Amazon Alexa will be able to ask follow up questions on the basis of what you’ve asked initially. This is another step towards a natural interaction experience with the voice assistant.
So, when you ask Alexa about the time required for steeping tea, you will be answered saying, “Five minutes is a good place to start,” and then it will ask a follow-up: “Would you like me to set a timer for five minutes?”
Amazon Explained that it uses a deep learning-based trigger model that considers factors including the text of the customer’s current session with Alexa and whether the customer has engaged with Alexa’s multi-skill suggestions in the past.
If the trigger model finds the context suitable, the system suggests a skill to service the latent goal. Those suggestions are based on relationships learned by the latent-goal discovery model