Acer notebooks to come with Amazon's Alexa pre-installed
Amazon's Alexa will soon be making its way into more people's homes via Acer notebooks, which are shipping with the voice-activated assistant pre-installed, Acer announced today.
Acer said the Spin 3 and Spin 5 lines, which are available now, come with Alexa. Eventually, Acer plans to roll out Alexa across its entire PC portfolio. In the coming weeks, the Acer Nitro 5 Spin convertible gaming notebook line will come with Alexa, as will select Aspire, Switch and Swift notebooks.
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Jerry Kao, president of IT Products Business of Acer, said the Spin 3 and Spin 5 are the "ideal products for the industry debut of Alexa voice functionality on notebooks."
The Spin 5 comes with four digital microphones that support far-field voice recognition, while other notebooks come with dual microphones that support near-field voice recognition. All of Acer's PC products will use Intel's Smart Sound Technology, an integrated audio DSP (digital signal processor) to provide support for voice control.
While Acer says it's the first to ship laptops with Alexa pre-installed, the Lenovo Yoga 730 series debuted earlier this year with support for the Amazon assistant. And earlier this year at CES, Asus and HP also said they'd be adding support for Alexa to their PCs this year -- to the detriment of Microsoft's Cortana.
Alexa's inroads with the PC business give it one more touchpoint for customers, who already interact with the Amazon tool through their Echo smart speakers and thousands of smart home devices.
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