Amazon’s rolling out a brand new “Ship to Alexa Plus” characteristic to the newest Kindle Scribe and Kindle Scribe Colorsoft house owners beginning February 12. The characteristic enables you to ship your notes or paperwork to Amazon’s AI-powered Alexa Plus assistant, which may then summarize them, flip them into to-do lists, calendar occasions, or reminders, in addition to assist brainstorm, and supply mission steering.
I spent a few day or so testing it primarily to assist with caregiving duties, and it was principally useful regardless of some limitations. It really works finest when requested to digest data into one thing actionable. It precisely summarized my handwritten notes and PDF paperwork, even throughout completely different templates or hard-to-read textual content colours, and it labored properly for logistics, like turning my notes about my mother’s subsequent appointment into calendar occasions and reminders with useful context.
I additionally examined how properly it answered questions on my notes and paperwork, supplied steering, and dealt with brainstorming. In a single check, whereas I used to be on maintain with Medi-Cal for 3 hours, my Echo Present 8 learn again key data from a dispute letter I had written earlier. I additionally despatched a PDF of an electronic mail and requested it so as to add up a listing of expenses, which it calculated appropriately. It was additionally good at pulling particular particulars. In a single case, I wrote “Blue Protect” in messy handwriting with out labeling it as an insurance coverage firm, and it nonetheless recognized it from context.
In one other check, I wrote notes for somebody who was taking my mother to an appointment and deliberately omitted particulars just like the handle. After I clicked “Share” and “Ship to Alexa,” I requested what may be lacking from the word. Alexa acquired the word and instructed including the handle, physician’s identify, treatment record, and inquiries to ask. It additionally generated an honest draft after I requested for assist brainstorming a telephone script for arguing with the insurance coverage firm, although sadly Alexa couldn’t truly apply these modifications to the unique Scribe word. I wasn’t capable of ship the complete model to my electronic mail handle both, sadly; I may, nonetheless, view the draft within the “chat historical past” part of the Alexa app.
The place it struggled was depth and nuance. I needed to check how helpful it could possibly be for, say, quizzing your self on a bit, so I despatched myself a duplicate of my old Kindle Scribe review and one other article. It took 4 or 5 tries to generate an in depth define, and it typically missed small however significant distinctions, like decoding “AI-powered summarization characteristic” as simply “AI-powered characteristic.” That was an issue because it marked solutions as appropriate once they had been solely partially proper.
Ship to Alexa Plus isn’t excellent, however total it’s genuinely helpful and provides Amazon an edge over rivals just like the Kobo Elipsa 2E, which lack voice assistant integration. The Elipsa 2E is still my favorite as a result of it covers the fundamentals higher — notably, it’s a lot simpler to annotate ebooks— however the Scribe is getting simpler to suggest in the event you’re in Amazon’s ecosystem.
