Amazon has just revealed its second generation Fire TV Cube promising enhanced and faster voice command systems plus more HDR support. The new Fire TV Cube is available for preorder now and ships out in early October.
Amazon’s first Fire TV Cube, released last year, was a stylish little device. Essentially an entertainment-focused Echo, it enabled voice control for most TVs, sound systems and cable boxes. The most novel thing about the Fire TV Cube, however, was what it called far-field voice recognition, enabling effective voice control that could identify a voice over the noise coming from the television, unlike other Alexa-controlled TV systems that required a user to directly talk into a microphone, often placed in a remote control. Amazon now claims to have improved this tech in the second-gen device so it picks your voice up better than ever from across the room while a TV is playing.
The newest iteration of the Cube also has doubles the processor speed of its predecessor, and incorporates something called Local Voice Control to speed up its response time. Instead of the regular delay common to most voice control systems where a command is sent to a server in the cloud, processed, and then a response is sent back to a local box, the new system incorporates built-in on-device processing for a number of key commands. So commands such as “Alexa, scroll right,” “Alexa, go home,” and “Alexa, select number one,” should be four times faster than the original Cube. The new Cube also now supports HDR10+ and Dolby Vision.
“Over the past year, we have continued to expand and advance the Fire TV Cube experience based on this feedback with dozens of new features including Multi-Room Music, Follow-Up Mode, and Alexa Communications,” says Vice President of Amazon Fire TV, Marc Whitten. “These key learnings carried over and guided the development of the second-generation Fire TV Cube, and we are excited to introduce this new-and-improved experience to customers around the world.”
The new Fire TV Cube is available for preorder now at the same price as its previous iteration, US$119.99. It's scheduled to ship on October 10.
Source: Amazon