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Amazon Inc. fulfilled its previously announced plan to allow group audio and video conferencing calls on its Echo devices, The Verge reported.
The feature will work on the Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Show in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, the UK and parts of Europe, the report noted.
The service appears to present a direct competitor to Zoom and Microsoft Teams in the market for providing group calls to relatively small groups of people. Zoom and Teams can serve much larger groups of callers.
In the US, according to The Verge, Echo 8 users will be able to join Zoom calls with the device. Conveniently, Echo users will be able to create groups with custom names like “family” for easy connection with multiple people at once.
Earlier this week, Amazon introduced what it calls “Live Translation” through its Alexa service. With the offer, each person who calls in a conversation between two people can speak in one language and have the other participant hear the conversation in another. “Alexa will automatically identify what language is being spoken and translate each side of the conversation,” Amazon wrote in a press release announcing the service.
Amazon added in the announcement: “To improve translation fluency and robustness to spoken language input, we are also working to adapt the neural machine translation engine to conversational speech data and generate translations that incorporate relevant context, such as tone of voice or formal versus informal translations. Finally, we continually work to improve the quality of translations in general and of colloquial and idiomatic expressions in particular. “
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STUDY NEW PYMNTS: HOW LOCATION DATA CAN HELP BANKS PREVENT ONLINE FRAUD
The November 2020 study How Location Data Can Help Banks Prevent Online Fraud, PYMNTS surveyed a balanced panel of 2,141 US consumers who own mobile devices and use credit or debit cards at least once a month. . The study examined their willingness to share mobile location data with FIs to keep their accounts safe, as well as their interest in switching to banks that take advantage of geolocation tools to prevent fraud.
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