Amazon's hardware chief talks Alexa, privacy and flying home security drones

Amazon just announced a slew of new products and features at its 2020 launch event with me is Dave Limp. Amazon's hardware chief Dave, thanks so much for being with me. Thanks for having us. So, I wanna jump in to tough questions starting off. It's an investigation from CNN. Talking about Amazon products that they found to be faulty. What What's your response to this? What did you think about this report? Well, you know, obviously safety of our customers is and our work and our workers is the most important thing we think about and we spend a huge amount of time testing our products. And one that I know of and that particular report was around our basics microwave. And we've spent a lot of time looking into those reviews and we stand by the product. We've gone to not only our own testing labs, but we also even sent it out to a third party testing lab and meets all the safety of the appropriate agencies and and standards. So Obviously, we're never gonna compromise our customer safety and if we find out new things, we're going to investigate those and if there's something that we have to fix, we're going to fix it. So talking a lot more broadly about Amazon products. And Alexa, how have you seen people use Alexa differently during the pandemic? Yeah, it's it's pretty incredible to see what people have had to do in across a lot of different aspects. I mean, nobody anticipated a pandemic and we certainly didn't plan for it. But I think I said it earlier our homes are now our offices. There are schools there are movie theaters and you know our focus on the home starting well over five years ago meant that a lot of our products became even more applicable in this environment. You know, take take the movie theater example. I you know, the amount of people, not a video people are streaming Is in much higher than it ever has been before it's accelerated this cutting the cord trend like nothing else. And Fire TV is a great example of that. We have billions of hours a month are now being streamed across the our Fire TV devices. People are reading more than ever so Kindle has seen even more books. They're going back to the classics and reading the classics. And you mentioned echo and Alexa, there's so many use cases there from homework help to the obvious one, which is the kind of things that we're doing right now which is communicating remotely. And so being able to communicate remotely through, certainly Alexa communications but Skype we've just added zoom and this announcement we added a lot of capabilities for communications both on fire TV, cube, and Obviously the new echo show 10. Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much for that. All that detail. I want to specifically talk about one new device that was announced. That was a very interesting surprise today and that was a mini home drone. That's indoors is an indoor Home Security drone. From ring, it's $250. Do you think people are gonna wanna buy this device? Well, I know we're going to sell at least one because I want one. But beyond that, that's why we announced these and we try to find out whether customers love what we love. You know and but we did hear from customers or in case of ring neighbors that you know they they love the use case of indoor cameras we through blink and ring we we obviously sell a lot of indoor cameras and whether that's true Watch your dog in my case beyond the couch when he's not supposed to, but in addition it also is for the use cases where something might happen untoward in your home, and you get events on that. That, but lots of customers either can't or don't want to put cameras in every room they might want to think about recharging them or they don't have power where they need, we would need it to get a field of view or they just don't want a camera in a certain room. And they always own cam, solves for that use case and it says, Listen, we'll bring the camera to the event as opposed to the event to the camera and, we'll see, I look forward to hearing what customers say. We really liked the use case though. I would expect and I'm sure, you would expect a lot of folks to quibble with that specific product Arguing that Amazon and a lot of other smart home companies are already providing too many cameras, too many microphones too much surveillance, too much data collection. So I'd love to hear your response to that. Yeah. And I think when you start thinking about putting cameras anywhere By the way, the vast majority are cameras are in each of our pockets cuz they're on our phones. You have to think about Privacy Foundationally and we've done a lot over this year around ring to add more security to give customers more peace of mind you know two factor authentication strong. Longer passwords and making all that mandatory that we were one of the first in the industry to do that. And we are the first in the industry with what we announced today, which is we announced end to end encryption that will come before the end of the year. And the key is stored on your phone so if you want all the video that there was the Amazon or anybody else will without the key will not have ability to see the video so customers will be able to choose that as an option as well. Now I think we're gonna have to continue to invent in the privacy front and the security front. You're never done across that surface but I'm Very proud of what the teams have been able to do over the past year to make it even more secure. Especially with this home drone, has Amazon gotten just one step closer to this widely expected Alexa home robot concept? I think both the echo show ten and what we're doing with the always home cam are examples of how robotics can become closer in your home. It's it's not yet Hanna and Barbera his vision of the Jetsons but it but it's taking one step closer to that. And a lot of the advancements that we see in AI that allow more autonomy, allow the ability to do things are the concepts that we put into those two products. That we can fly autonomous to where an event happens in case of the drone, or in the case of Echo Show 10. When you're on a call it can intelligently follow with you so you can react naturally and not be static like we've been taught for so many years. Jumping off of that idea. You spoke today a lot about how the future home will be able to anticipate you and anticipate your needs. How much closer are we to that? How close do you think we will be to having that type of home?>> Yeah, it's you know, I think Daniel said it best on our video today what you know that your home should work hard on your behalf not you work hard. And so the nice thing that we've been seeing is that true Trend line has increased as we've been able to add more intelligent features behind what Alexa can do. if I told you this three years ago 90 high 99 percentile of interactions with Alexa three plus years ago would have been you saying Alexa and her responding and acting on your behalf. Now one in 5, 20 percent of what Alexa is doing is being done proactively. She she's instigating the event based on something that you've given her permission to do. It might be run a routine, it might be a hunch that you left their back door open and unlocked before you went to bed. It might be an example of when it's in guard mode that there's an event going on in your house like a smoke alarm going off. And, you know, again, I don't think we'll ever get to a point where you're not going to have certain circumstances where you're going to talk to your home but we definitely want to get more and more towards the the point where Alexa can help you on your behalf. So Dave, I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for speaking with us. It's always a pleasure to get to talk to you. And if you wanna read more or learn more about any of these products, gotta cnet.com. And Dave, thanks again for your time. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.