Amazon is making major changes to the use of its Alexa assistant and has decided to eliminate some services that were available for free. They will not disappear completely, but will now be included in a subscription that will have to be paid independently to continue using them. How will users react?
Don’t worry, because, for now, you will be able to continue talking to Alexa for free, ask her the time, find out if it is raining or use the skills. But some of the additional uses that the digital assistant has related to home automation and Amazon Echo terminals are going to change and will now be paid.
Changes to Alexa Guard
Alexa Guard and the Alexa Guard Plus version, as you can see in the screenshot below, are no longer available. Amazon has decided to give the service a facelift that allows it to turn its assistant into a watchdog to know that users’ homes are safe.
Some of the features that were available in Alexa Guard for free will remain free. They will be included within the normal Alexa functions so you can use them depending on your needs. This will happen both with the Away Lighting system that allows you to turn on the lights remotely so that it seems like you are at home, and with the Home and Away modes of Ring alarms. With these modes, what you can do is activate the alarm or deactivate it remotely in a simple way. Luckily, all of that will still be free. But, other functions will become paid within a new subscription package.
This is the Emergency Assist service
It is currently only available in the United States, but Amazon likely intends to bring it to other countries as its security devices gain international popularity. Emergency Assist is priced at $5.99 per month or $59 per year and includes new options and options taken from Alexa Guard.
The latter is the case of the smoke detector and the one that is responsible for discovering if there is a carbon monoxide leak inside the home. All of this will be within Emergency Assist along with other functions such as the possibility for Alexa to listen to what is happening at home and detect if a glass has broken. Thus, she could warn of the possible presence of an intruder who had entered the house by breaking the window. In addition, it also allows you to easily call the police in case an incident occurs. However, there may be other features that will be announced as the months go by.
To make the change as less dramatic as possible, Amazon has some offers. For users who have linked their Ring alarm with Alexa as of September 20, the company is giving them a subscription to Alexa Emergency Assist until October 31 of next year, 2024, which is not bad at all. Of course, the debut of this new service is carried out with a promotional price, since the rates that we have mentioned before will only be available until January 8. At least, for non-Prime subscribers, since Prime users will be able to keep the price of $5.99 until further notice. The only thing left to know would be how much Alexa Emergency Assist will cost for non-Prime subscribers starting in January, something that will be announced in the near future.
jimmy
@automated_hous
Well I guess this explains how Alexa Guard works with Alexa Emergency Assist: it doesn’t! AEA offers a way for Amazon to paywall some of the Guard features that used to be free 😡 https://t.co/uF7lKcRGvK
September 26, 2023 • 11:39
eleven
2
Although these changes in the security environment of Alexa and Amazon may not affect you much, since in our country the adoption of Ring alarms does not seem to be going at a great pace, we must not ignore what they mean these turns of the wheel. The e-commerce giant is making many modifications to its services in which a dominant note can be seen: eliminating free resources, increasing their cost or putting them under new subscriptions. You never know what might change next at Amazon, but it’s obvious that they don’t seem to be done with their changes and profit-increasing ideas.
