Acer’s latest laptops come with support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. And Asus and HP announced plans to bring Alexa to some of their PCs earlier this year.
Now Amazon says it’s working with ODMs (original design manufacturers) too. The company has unveiled four new PC designs that feature microphones for far-field voice recognition that can be used to talk to Alexa from across a room.
In other words, companies that want a quick way to bring an Alexa-enabled PC to market can now contract with one of the manufacturers to build a system based on one of these reference designs.
Quanta’s design is for a 14 inch convertible notebook with a full HD display, a fingerprint reader, long battery life, stereo speakers, and 4 digital microphones.
Compal, meanwhile, has a 15.6 inch full HD convertible with a fingerprint reader, IR camera, and stylus support. This model is “built for gaming, multimedia, and Alexa,” suggesting it may have discrete graphics. Like Quanta’s laptop, the Compal design feature stereo speakers and four digital mics.
Wistron has two designs: one is for a 15.6 inch convertible notebook with a full HD display and another is for a 27 inch all-in-one desktop PC with an Ultra HD display and IR sensor. Both of Wistron’s Alexa-enabled computers have four MEMs microphones and stereo speakers.
Since these companies won’t be selling the computers under their own brand names, there’s no word on pricing or availability. But don’t be surprised if you start to see some lookalike Alexa-enabled PCs in the not too distant future.