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Alexa Live is an annual conference for developers who use the digital assistant. <\/figcaption>screenshot: Amazon<\/figcaption><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\nAmazon is hosting its annual Alexa developers annual conference, called Alexa Live<\/span>, today. The event will introduce a heaping of new APIs for developers to build with, meaning new abilities coming to an Echo speaker or smart display near you. Many of the tools being introduced are there to drive the idea of \u200b\u200bAmazon’s Alexa Ambient Home. Some of what the company announced will also make it easier for brands to infiltrate your home through your digital assistant.<\/p>\nAt least Amazon said something about Matter<\/span>. The company announced new initiatives to help prepare its digital assistant for the Matter standard, which we’re still expecting to launch sometime this year<\/span>. Despite its severe delay, Amazon is still using Matter as a selling point for its digital assistant, since the promise of a fully interoperable smart home is still the dream\u2014at least for those of us still tinkering with it.<\/p>\nIf you’ve got Amazon’s Alexa in your smart home, here are some highlights from Alexa Live. <\/p>\n
The Alexa Ambient Home<\/h2>\n
To kick things off, Amazon announced the Alexa Ambient Home Dev Kit, a collection of five APIs meant to make the Alexa-based smart home experience feel more unified across the board. <\/p>\n
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First up, the dev kit includes the Home State API, which can read different \u201cstates\u201d of your smart home, like knowing when you’re at home, on vacation, enjoying dinner with your housemates, or taking a nap. You could use these different modes to help Alexa understand what state the smart home should be in during these particular moments. For instance, you might theoretically set up Alexa and any security apps prone to alerting you to snooze during your napping hours. <\/p>\n
Speaking of security, Alexa is getting a feature that’s already baked into many DIY security kits. The new Safety & Security APIs will extend Alexa Guard’s usefulness by adding sound alerts to Echo devices. That means your microphone-equipped Echo Show 15<\/span> or smart speaker can listen in for smoke and CO2 alarms and let you know when they’re blaring at home.<\/p>\nFor smart homes with many rooms and people, the Device & Group Organization API will automatically sync device and group names between Alexa and third-party apps. You will no longer have to worry about setting up different configurations between apps. It’ll be interesting to see how this is implemented, as apps like Philips Hue can be annoying to manage because they treats rooms differently than your digital assistant. <\/p>\n
The last two APIs of this development kit seem specifically catered to prepping Alexa for its eventual Matter future. Matter’s inherent \u201clog on and it works\u201d nature fits in squarely with Amazon’s vision for the ambient smart home. The first Matter-related API is called Credentials and allows you to set up new devices without repeatedly inputting your network name and password. Instead, it’ll rely on one centralized piece of hardware connected to the network to take care of the handshake. The second one is referenced as Multi-Admin Simple Setup, allowing you to set up a third-party app to manage smart devices using Amazon’s cloud-based services.<\/p>\n