Amazon’s Alexa just got a nifty new upgrade, and these features are so useful

I personally don’t have an Amazon assistant, but from what I understand, these things are pretty useful. You can online shop through them, play media, get the weather, and more. But until now, Amazon’s Alexa hadn’t been able to do some other assistant-y things. Namely, setting custom reminders and multiple timers.

Until now. The Alexa is getting a new update that’ll give it even more useful functions.

If you’re wondering why the Alexa didn’t have this feature in the first place, honestly: beats me! But the difference is less in ability than in functionality, as various Alexa apps could perform those tasks. Now it’s Alexa itself who can get the job done.

What would be interesting to me is in seeing the difference between manually setting those reminders, and verbally setting them. (Something that’s the case with other voice assistant systems like Siri or Google Assistant.) As someone who has reminders that’ll go on for months, as well as alarms for five-minute intervals, clearly, I like reminding myself on my own. But not everyone has the instinct or the neuroses to do that, in which case these new features are dope.

Technology: Sometimes scary, oftentimes helpful, ever-creeping toward the uncanny valley.