Don’t feel like turning on CNN to watch election returns? Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, has been updated to provide real-time election updates, the e-commerce giant announced on Tuesday.
Alexa is Amazon’s voice-controlled digital assistant, which can already answer simple questions like “Who is the 44th President of the United States?” As well as play music on-command and order household goods. The service is limited to select Amazon (AMZN) devices, such as one of Amazon’s home automation devices (the Echo and Echo Dot) or Fire TV for streaming video.
For the past few months, Alexa has been able to inform users with the latest polling numbers for the two presidential candidates: Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
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As of Election Day, Alexa will be able to answer questions about which states Trump and Clinton have won, respectively, how many electoral votes each candidate has, how much of the popular vote each candidate has, projections for state winners, and how many votes each candidate has in each state. Later on, Alexa will be able to provide final election results for the presidential race when ready to call.
Alexa is powered by artificial intelligence, the machine learning technology that powers driverless cars and other intelligent machines that are slowly taking over human tasks. But in order to make Alexa more human-like, the technology needs human interaction to help program and teach it.
According to a recent Seattle Times report, Amazon has had a team comprised of a half a dozen employees working to ensure Alexa was ready to answer up-to-date queries about the presidential election. But this wasn’t the first time Alexa has been “prepped” to answer specific questions about a major news event as the company did something similar during the Summer Olympics in August.
