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Mio Slice review: Heart rate done right, but style is still a struggle

Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

While a lot of fitness tracker companies struggle to make devices that combine the best of all worlds, others are sticking to what they know. Mio has been making heart rate monitors for years—most of its trackers are not the most comprehensive or the most stylish, but Mio knows heart rate, and it's sticking with that.

The new $130 Slice fitness tracker shifts slightly out of Mio's comfort zone while still mostly focusing on heart rate. It has a few extra features, including daily activity and sleep tracking, as well as smartphone alerts, but it uses Mio's optical heart rate monitoring technology and PAI point systems to assess your fitness level on a weekly basis. It's clear Mio sees the need to modernize its lineup with the Slice, but it also has to convince users that a one-trick pony can be just as good as a multipurpose device.

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from Mio Slice review: Heart rate done right, but style is still a struggle

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Amazon’s Alexa could soon recognize users by their voices

(credit: Adam Bowie)

Amazon's Alexa may be about to get smarter. According to a report from Time, the online retailer is working on voice identification software for Alexa that would allow the service to identify who in a household is speaking to it. "People familiar with Amazon's Alexa strategy" claim this feature has been under development since 2015, and the challenge now is in strategically integrating it into Alexa devices like Amazon Echo.

The report claims that the feature is internally called Voice ID, and it would match a person's voice to a prerecorded "voice print" to identify who is talking. The primary account holder could limit specific actions to only those matching a specific voice print. For example, any voice-made purchases could be limited to parents in a household so children don't go on voice-enabled shopping sprees.

Alexa and other voice assistants including Apple's Siri, Google's Assistant, and Microsoft's Cortana all essentially do the same thing: they respond to voice commands and can answer questions like "How's the weather?" or "What's on my calendar today?" However, none can decipher who is doing the talking—and in homes where a device is linked to multiple accounts, that could become problematic. Amazon Alexa can already swatch between different user accounts, but the speaker must say "Switch accounts" or use the Alexa app to do so.

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