Amazon Looks Beyond Speakers With Alexa-Powered Home Robots
Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) gave birth to the smart-speaker market five years ago when it launched its first Echo device. Alphabet's Google, Facebook, Apple, and others all subsequently launched their own speakers, but Amazon still controlled two-thirds of the U.S. market last year, according to eMarketer. The smart-speaker market still has room to grow, but Amazon is already exploring the next step for Alexa -- a mobile home robot that can freely roam around a user's home. Reports about the robot, codenamed Vesta, surfaced last year, but more details about the device have emerged recently. Bloomberg claims that Amazon initially planned to launch Vesta this year, but it still isn't ready to be mass produced. The report, which cites people familiar with the matter, claims that the prototypes are waist-high and navigate autonomously with computer vision cameras. An engineer summoned the Vesta with his voice during an internal demo, and the final version should be integrated with...