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From: Paula Starnauld <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2016 15:06:14 -0400

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These high-end home automation service providers may not sound familiar, but they're the names that typically dominate the headlines coming out of the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association's yearly tech expo for luxury AV gear and the dealers who provide it.

This year, Amazon joined their ranks.

"What are we doing here?" asked Amazon executive Charlie Kindel as he kicked off his keynote address to the CEDIA membership. The answer was simple. "We want to partner with all of you."

charlie-kindel-cedia-keynote-1.jpgEnlarge Image
Charlie Kindel, Amazon's Vice President of Alexa.

Kindel is Amazon's head of Alexa, its cloud-based, voice-activated computing service.
Kindel put it another way, though, describing how developers at Amazon often start by writing a press release for the product they want to develop, complete with a crisp vision statement at the top.
For the Kindle (Kindel insists Amazon spells it wrong), it was "any book, anywhere in the world, in a minute or less."

For Alexa, the vision was "a Star Trek computer for the home," but Kindel took it even further. "At Amazon, we think we're on the cusp of the next major disruption in computing. We think that disruption is around voice."

"On the cusp" might be putting lightly. Since debuting in 2014, the Amazon Echo smart speaker, the first point of access for Alexa, has been one of the online retailer's clearest successes. Apart from "off the charts" sales figures, Kindel was quick to cite usage statistics. "Not only are customers buying this product, but they're using it regularly," he said. "Customers who use Alexa for the smart home use it an average of sixteen times a day."

The average Amazon rating? 4.4 out of 5 stars across more than 40,000 reviews.

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