By will-buy
Amazon is upgrading the Echo Buds earbuds with new fitness features made to track runs along with other exercises. The voice assistant acts as a type of Fitbit inside your ears, measuring your steps along with other areas of the activity in a workout profile, using the whole feature controlled by voice command like any other Alexa skill.
Accelerating Fitness
Echo Buds owners have to produce a workout profile around the Alexa mobile app to gain access to the exercise feature, investing in physical details like height and weight before starting to workout. Once the profile is set up, and also the earbuds are in place, a user merely has to state, “Alexa, start my workout,” for the voice assistant to begin measuring. The Echo Buds use built-in accelerometers to track the wearer’s steps throughout the exercise and Alexa then combines that information with the data added beforehand to measure distance, pace, calories expended, along with other metrics. While running, people wearing the Echo Buds can also ask Alexa to alter the music and begin either specific playlists or ones appropriate towards the moment like “fast songs for running.” After asking Alexa to finish the workout or run, the consumer can ask the voice assistant for data. The feature is going to be rolling in the U.S. and UK this week, along with other counties under consideration, Amazon said.
Alexa is really a part of other fitness-focused devices, augmenting Fitbit smartwatches beginning with the Versa 2 last year and also the Fitbit Sense and Versa 3 smartwatches earlier this summer. The voice assistant was alone on the smartwatches until Fitbit added Google Assistant to the new smartwatches this month while upgrading Alexa having a vocal response option. The fact that Google is while acquiring Fitbit likely helped motivate the choice to provide the Echo Buds fitness features, past the obvious potential demand.
Working Out
The Echo Buds are the first of Amazon’s in-house wearables to use the voice assistant for fitness, but not Amazon’s first exercise-focused wearable tech. But, Amazon’s new Halo fitness wearable is Alexa-free despite two microphones as well as an advanced AI. The microphones are instead for the Tone feature, which analyzes the noise of a wearer's voice, reporting the way they may appear to others. The wearable can perform sophisticated diagnoses, like determining someone’s body fat according to photos. The steps-tracking will help the Echo Buds stick out compared to Amazon’s rivals. Apple AirPods and Google Pixel Buds 2 have accelerometers but don’t use them for fitness at the moment, and the $129 Echo Buds are cheaper compared to $159 and $179 Apple and Google options, respectively. After including fitness features into the Echo Buds, it will be worth watching to see if the reviews from the hearables go up in esteem.
