OREANDA-NEWS. December 02, 2016. Earlier this week, Intel outlined a vision for what the Smart Home can be today, and where it is headed in the near future. In support of that strategic vision, on Wednesday at Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, Intel joined Amazon to unveil two technology initiatives to advance the Smart Home ecosystem and extend natural language capabilities to consumers everywhere.

The first is enabling Alexa Skills to remotely control and coordinate device actions with an Intel-based Smart Home Hub.

The second is an Intel-based smart speaker reference design with Amazon Alexa. It is intended to help hardware manufacturers accelerate their development of voice-enabled devices with the Intel platform and Alexa Voice Services. The reference design will be available to developers and manufacturers in the first quarter of 2017.

For those of attending Amazon re:Invent, you may visit the Intel TINY Smart Home to see some of these Intel-Alexa collaborations in action. For more on Intel and Alexa, visit the Amazon Developer blog.

Additionally, Amazon Web Services announced AWS Greengrass software and Intel hardware coming together to solve asset tracking problems. Intel IoT solutions have experience in the industrial IoT sector, providing solutions that can survive extended temperatures and handle rugged conditions, with I/O for OT equipment and connectivity. AWS Greengrass software supports a very low compute/memory/power profile, and can also take advantage of more powerful resources. Intel Architecture can provide AWS Greengrass a robust, scalable platform for end-to-end consistent hardware and software connectivity to optimize and run on cloud, edge or both. For more on AWS Greengrass, view the AWS news release.