YouTube Returns To Amazon Echo Show AI Assistant Following UI Dispute
Owners of the Amazon Echo Show speaker might have been a bit miffed back in September when YouTube pulled access to its app from the device. Amazon said at the time that the reason it pulled the app from the Show was
Google said at the time, "Amazon’s implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience."
The crux of the issue that forced the rift between Google and Amazon was a non-standard YouTube display. The first image below with the Tour de France videos shows the original YouTube interface that caused the rift.
Amazon told Voicebot.ai, "We’re excited to offer customers the capability to watch even more video content from sources such as Vimeo, YouTube, and Dailymotion on Echo Show. More video sources will be added over time."
Echo Show users might not like the changed interface that YouTube has forced, as it's arguably less attractive. Voice commands can reportedly be used to pause and play video. Amazon has reached out to us to say that you can, in fact, make the video full screen using the "Alexa zoom in" voice command. All voice controls available in the previous YouTube implementation are still available with the new interface.
The new YouTube layout does give more additional videos to view with five instead of about two and a half on the old layout. The new layout looks very familiar to folks used to browsing YouTube via a computer. Users who hate the new layout can get something more akin to the old layout by searching YouTube using voice commands. After videos are searched using voice commands you can play them back by saying the number of the video.
