Amazon and Twitch will start giving away free games to Prime members

Amazon and Twitch partnered over a year ago with a promise to improve the experience for its users. Now one of the benefits is that Twitch Prime users will be getting 10 free games over the next two months. With eight out of the 10 games coming out of the Twitch Prime Indie Amplifier. The two companies are kicking it off with Superhot and Oxenfree, marking the first time Amazon and Twitch are using their partnership to give away games for free. You can check out the rest of the games here.

Source: The Verge

Amazon is recalling 260,000 AmazonBasics power banks due to ‘fire and burn hazards’

If you purchased an AmazonBasics power bank recently, you should expect to get an email from Amazon notifying you that the product is being recalled due to overheating reports. According to the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, “the power bank’s battery can overheat and ignite, posing fire and burn hazards.” Amazon has reportedly gotten 53 reports of these incidents happening so far and it’s asking users to stop using the product. The power banks affected have the model numbers B00ZQ4JQAA, B00LRK8JDC, B00LRK8IV0, B00LRK8I7O, B00LRK8EVO, and B00LRK8HJ8 and come with 16,100mAh, 10,000mAh, 5,600mAh, 3,000mAh, 3,000mAh (with microUSB cable), and 2,000mAh (with micro USB cable) battery capacities.

The company is asking consumers to confirm through the link in an email that they still have the product and that they follow disposal instructions. A gift card will be issued within 10 working days for those confirmed to have the unit. If you bought one of the units and you still haven’t been contacted by Amazon, you can get in touch with the retailer online through this link or call Amazon toll-free at 855-215-5134 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. ET Monday through Saturday.

Source: Android Authority

Amazon claims its working on the laughing Echo devices

It’s like one of our worst nightmares coming true. Some Amazon Echo users are reporting that Alexa has started laughing at random without any prompting. One user on Twitter claims it started to laugh as he was about to fall asleep, another one on Reddit describes the laugh as sounding almost like a real person (after Alexa refused to turn off his lights after three tries). Amazon says they are aware of the issue and are working on the matter.

Here’s Amazon’s official statement about the issue: “In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh.’ We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’ We are also changing Alexa’s response from simply laughter to ‘Sure, I can laugh’ followed by laughter.” 

Source: Gizmodo

Amazon tipped to be trying to add real-time translation to Alexa

Possibly taking its cues from Google Assistant, Amazon is reportedly trying to turn its Alexa voice assistant into a real-time translator. What would be different this time around is that it won’t just translate phrases but also supposedly include local culture into its responses. Amazon is reportedly looking into making this feature available on multiple devices and it’s hoping to translate multiple conversations at once. It isn’t clear though where Amazon’s translation skills will be coming from. But if this is happening, we should hear about it soon enough.

Source: The Verge