Amazon has just started to bring Alexa into the smartphones market. Huawei Mate 9 and HTC U11 users can now take advantage of the intelligent voice assistant. Despite it having the highest number of skill count among to other voice assistants, Amazon Alexa on mobile phones has been quite problematic, a new test reveals.
Amazon Alexa is downloadable on any phones. HTC and Huawei both have their own Alexa assistant specifically designed for their flagship smartphones, the Mate 9 and U11, respectively. The HTC Alexa, however, seems problematic as the voice assistant cannot control the phone settings. This gives it a difficult job to be smarter as the Amazon Echo version.
HTC Alexa's skill count is limited, according to CNET. A number of Alexa's native skills are not applicable to HTC's version and this has something to do with the configuration of the settings on the mobile version that is beyond the bounds of the smart assistant.
Alexa on HTC U11 cannot provide text-based search results unlike Apple Siri; instead, it responds to search requests in a speech just like what it does on Amazon Echo and variants. Talking about music commands, it does not have the ability to play music from Spotify, iHeart Radio, TuneIn, and Pandora.
When shopping online, HTC Alexa cannot launch the Amazon app to sort out purchases, and unfortunately, it will not give users a bullet list of alternatives in case the top search falls short of the criteria. Additionally, the smart voice assistant cannot set an alarm, timer, and reminder. It does not have the ability to control phone settings and launch apps due to its configurations set by Amazon.
What HTC Alexa can do, it wakes up to the call "Alexa" even if the screen is off; it gives enables users to control their smart home, play music through Amazon Music, flash news bits from different media outfits, predict and show weather, check traffic or sports score, and much more.
