Amazon Echo

And then when I went to Amazon Alexa, there was a big question of IP around voices, right? So...

Samuel L. Jackson licensed his voice briefly so that you could use Samuel L. Jackson's voice on your Amazon Echo.

And that was a kind of like a trailblazing event, right? Nowadays, we talk about it a lot with Eleven Labs, with ChatGPT, but back then it was kind of a first of its kind.

So that was also all about IP.

weird thing to get mad about.

It is, ain't it? But recently I changed the voice command on my home Amazon Echo.

Oh, you still got one of them listening devices from the government? I changed it from Alexa to Ziggy.

I thought that was funny because I'm Kenny.

However, when I was young and I didn't know how to spell a word and I was told to go look it up in the dictionary, but I didn't know how to spell it.

Now I can just turn to any voice-operated AI, such as Echo, Amazon Echo, and say, how do you spell X, Y, Z? And it's like, blah, blah, blah.

And how do I say this word in Spanish or German or Dutch or whatever? It's so

beguiling.

The example I'll give is When voice control got started, we launched our first voice product within a couple months of Amazon launching Alexa, shortly after Google launched Google Home, and then within probably two years, Apple launched the HomePod.

And what I found so interesting is the progression was Josh Micro came out, Amazon Echo with Alexa came out, Google Home came out, Apple HomePod came out, and then...

Shortly after that, which was now a couple years between that period, Josh Nano, our newer microphone, came out.

When you look at what the Amazon, Google, and Apple products look like, even though they couldn't say it's the way we've always done it, there was quickly this feeling of, well, it's the way the others are doing it.

So the Amazon Echo form factor was almost exactly the same as the Google Home form factor, which was almost exactly the same as the Apple HomePod form factor.

And it was so funny to me just looking back saying, is anyone actually talking to homeowners and understanding what would make these products better? And so we went and we did that.

And the feedback we got was, we don't want to have a big garbage can looking thing that sits in the middle of the room that plugs into an outlet and is a speaker.

Today, I'm going to be showing you the NFB News iMobile app on the iPhone.

It's also available on iPad, Android devices, Amazon Echo speakers, online, on the Telephone Access Method app, on braille displays and on talking book players.

So you can pick your favorite device and use what you like to read.

There are about 24 Texas newspapers on the service.