Amazon makes ‘reference design’ for Alexa speaker with Intel

Web store Amazon, together with Intel, has made a reference design of a speaker with digital assistant Alexa and its own technology to recognize voices from far away. The reference design should enable other manufacturers to quickly make their own speakers.

Manufacturers can use Amazon’s reference design for their own speakers, because the Intel chips in it offer standard support for techniques such as zigbee, z-wave, bluetooth and wifi. In addition, it includes Amazon’s microphone technology to recognize voices from across the room, the companies claim. As a result, manufacturers should be able to make new speakers faster that contain Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa, the web store writes.

Together with the speaker, both companies will come up with an SDK to develop software for the accessory. The reference design shows that Amazon and Intel want to quickly conquer a part of the smart speaker market. Recently, Google started selling its speaker Home, which includes Google Assistant. Amazon has had its similar Echo speaker series for some time now. In addition, there are some other devices that can connect to Alexa, such as the Pebble computer Core.

It is unknown which manufacturers will work with the reference design of the speaker. Also, Amazon and Intel have not released any images of what the speaker looks like.

Not the reference design, but an Amazon Echo Dot