A young girl —Nikita — from Basti district of Uttar Pradesh used Alexa to ward off monkey menace at her home recently. Technology was the big enabler, a helping hand if you will, but come to think of it, it was actually her great presence of mind and quick wit that saved the day.
Monkeys entered the young girl’s home through an unattended gate, which was left often by visiting guests. From there, they found their way to the kitchen. Nikita’s younger sister spotted the monkeys, got scared, and raised the alarm. Sharing her experience with news agency Asian News International (ANI), Nikita said that upon hearing her sister’s cries, she came to the kitchen, and found the monkeys creating a ruckus.
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She was scared, like anybody else in her situation would, but what’s amazing is that Nikita did not lose her calm and composure. Rather, she was patient enough to observe her surroundings and quickly realised the household had an Amazon Echo Dot smart speaker in use.
Her next response was even quicker wherein she asked Alexa — which is the default voice assistant in all Amazon Echo speakers — to play out the bark of a dog and so it did. And it helped. The “barking” speaker scared the monkeys out of their home. No one was hurt, thankfully.
Alexa recently completed six years in India. Amazon says devices with Alexa such as Echo smart speakers and the Fire TV Stick have been purchased from across 99 percent pin codes in India “equally” in metro and non-metro cities. Moreover, there’s been a 200 percent increase in smart home devices connected to Alexa in the last three years alone, it adds. The company attributes this trend to easy setup and exhaustive catalogue of skills, the currency for all the things that you can do with Alexa.
