Amazon Alexa Will Soon Available On 1MB RAM-Powered Devices

Amazon has shipped its Alexa voice assistant to a bunch of devices, including not only smartphones and smart speakers but also gadgets like earbuds, microwave ovens, and eyeglasses. The company seems to go to a great length to make Alexa more compatible with low-power devices, which only offer 1MB of memory and run on a cheap Cortex-M processor. If successful, you’ll be able to use voice control through Alexa on any type of relatively dumb gadgets such as lightbulbs or toys.

At present, a device needs to come packed with at least 100MB of RAM and a Cortex-A chipset under the hood. Many believe that this limitation won’t help smart devices serve as a central hub for others controlled by Alexa.

Talking to TechCrunch, Dirk Didascalou – Vice president at AWS IoT department, claimed that the company is working on offloading the vast majority of the progress to the cloud, leaving the device with the only task it needs to do is to detect a wake word. The company expects to reduce the costs on material by up to 50% when using lower-powered processors from Qualcomm, NXP, and other chip suppliers.

Amazon did not mention any specific type of such devices that might come with Alexa, but this likely means that all you need to do is to speak to your light bulb and it’ll respond to you in a timely manner thanks to Alexa. According to Didascalou, this could be a massive step towards tech-focused environments.