Amazon is making its smart home speaker ‘smarter’ by introducing a new feature called Adaptive Volume’. This will help the speakers to solve a recurring problem experienced by users. The feature will make Alexa respond louder if there is noise in the background. The company says that this feature is to make sure that users can hear the responses by Alexa over any background noise. The feature is already available to US customers. It can be activated by saying “Alexa, turn on adaptive volume.”
Details on whether this feature will work in the opposite way, that is decreasing volume if there isn’t any noise, are not shared by the company. Alexa currently has other methods to reduce the volume. The Whisper Mode is one of them, that makes Alexa whisper its response when users talk to it quietly. This feature can also be activated by asking Alexa to turn the mode on. Alexa also enables users to set a routine for adjusting the volume according to time. The “set volume” action can be used to create a routine that activates at a particular time or a bedtime routine.
Users who got to test the Adaptive Volume noticed that the responses were a bit inconsistent. Also, this feature is not similar to the spherical Echo fourth gen’s adaptive sound. It uses the microphones of the device to tune music that will make them sound better in a specific room. Smart assistants like Google Nest’s Ambient IQ also employ techniques to adapt to the surroundings.
