Amazon builds the anti-metaverse with “Ambient Intelligence”

In the short hour Amazon tackles new products every fall, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees why the company may need to sell both a sleep-tracking alarm clock and, say, a robot.

But while Amazon is figuring out how best to offer “ambient intelligence” — products in which computers and interfaces driven by screens take a backseat in favor of proactive information and natural, voice-driven interactions — it seems like every to fill a possible niche with his Alexa voice assistant as a valid solution.

This year, Amazon has geared its products toward reducing distractions and limiting screen time, but the most interesting announcement might be how it’s now subtly positioning itself against the industry’s current obsession with mixed reality and the metaverse.

What is “Ambient Intelligence”?

Ambient computing, or “Ambient Intelligence,” as Amazon specifically refers to the thinking behind its products, is about making the computer “disappear.” This can be done in a number of ways, but Amazon has identified three main descriptors for its own “environmentally-aware” devices. They are intuitive, proactive and personalized.

The reasoning is: technology should be intuitive to use or figure out how to use it. It should be proactive about what information it shares with you and take action itself so you can limit your time spent using it. And technology should be personalized, know what it needs to know about you to be useful, and fit into your life in ways that make sense to you.

Talking to Alexa on an Echo speaker is often as simple as asking a question. Features like “Alexa Hunches” proactively let you know the status of your various smart home devices and can even take action – turn them off or change their settings – without you having to ask. At the Amazon event, Dave Limp, the company’s senior vice president of Devices and Services, shared that 90 percent of Alexa routines (programmable collections of actions for smart home devices) are initiated without a customer saying a word. This impressive stat requires some adjustments on the part of the user, but it suggests that Amazon’s vision for a future with even fewer direct interactions with the technology is doable — if not already there for some people.

This is very different from the vision of a company like Meta, which envisions a less intrusive computing future enabled by augmented reality, but is committed to a virtual reality presence that includes wearing $1,000 displays on the face, to go to work, meet friends, and have fun. The Meta Quest Pro headset could end up being absolutely stunning, but I can’t say it sounds more appealing to spend all day in than a world where my interactions with screens are limited by default.

As Limp emphasized in his closing remarks at the Amazon event, “the real world matters to customers.” Amazon’s products are an attempt to keep people here in the real world, solving things “behind the scenes” rather than dragging them to another screen. Digital wellbeing features aside, most other companies are going in a very different direction.

All eyes on the next internet

Meta isn’t just toying with VR, AR, and a future mobile internet that could connect them all. Google has made it clear that it will try to make AR glasses again, many co-run companies have their own ideas about the Metaverse, and Apple has all but announced it has been making AR and VR products for years, with signs pointing to the possible January release of their own mixed reality headset. These plans only serve to strengthen Amazon’s case.

But what’s not on the surface of Amazon’s pitch, but implicit in all of its new products, is what’s required for “ambient intelligence” to work: lots of cameras, lots of microphones, and a ubiquitous internet connection throughout the house.

Adding Eero mesh network extension capabilities to Echo Dot smart speakers is a clever way to simplify building your smart home, and makes it that much more enticing to place an Echo in any room. Easier networking was a mini-topic of the event; Amazon also announced new Eero PoE 6 routers that are Ethernet powered and can be placed anywhere you can run cables. Returning to the always-on microphone side, both the Fire TV Cube and Fire TV Omni QLED series make controlling your media center with Alexa that much better.

“[Amazon’s] Vision of technology requires you to have a fundamentally different relationship with technology in your life…”

Amazon has privacy in mind with all of its new products, from simple things like shutters for cameras on its Echo Show smart displays, to end-to-end encryption for the systems that actually handle all of the video and audio that feeds it Companies tracked (Amazon does this too). -device processing). But it doesn’t change the fact that the company’s vision of technology requires you to have a fundamentally different relationship with the technology in your life, one in which you’re constantly being watched rather than interacting with your computer or phone whenever You want. Not to say that none of these Metaverse ideas will require less monitoring, but at least for now, you can take off the headset.

Increasingly, two future visions of how we will interact with technology and each other are emerging: one is to bring us even closer to the screens we already have, and the other is to push as much proactive technology into the world stuffing us around that we never really need to interact directly with computers. It’s hard to say if one will be better than the other, or if either will even come into play, but it seems like Amazon now knows it could have value in promoting itself as an alternative to the Metaverse hype to style.