Fossil will add Alexa support to its army of Wear OS smartwatches, the company has confirmed.
In a briefing on the new Skagen Falster Gen 6, a Fossil spokesperson revealed to Wareable that the company was adding Amazon’s voice assistant – and that the update would roll out to watches running Wear 2.0 and Wear 3.0.
It seems the announcement was made as reassurance to customers that Fossil is still committed to updating and improving its smartwatches, despite only the latest Gen 6 devices getting the Wear 3.0 update.
Like many Wear OS manufacturers, it’s still working to get smartwatches upgraded to Wear OS 3.0 – and it's tight lipped about the process, and any agreements in place with Google.
The company also said that engineers were still getting Wear 3.0 working with Qualcomm hardware – after it launched initially on Samsung silicon.
But the uncertainty is frustrating for Wear OS users, so this announcement feels like a sweetener to existing Fossil users.
But, there’s still a lot we don’t know about how the integration will work.
We’re not sure whether the Alexa experience will be audio driven, or whether it will offer text responses – as we’ve seen on Fitbit devices.
And Fossil says we will have to wait to find out whether it will offer any Fossil-specific commands.
Alexa will land on Fossil smartwatches in early 2022, so we won’t have long to wait. But like the Wear OS 3.0 update – when exactly is anyone’s guess.
How we test
James is the co-founder of Wareable, and he has been a technology journalist for 15 years.
He started his career at Future Publishing, James became the features editor of T3 Magazine and T3.com and was a regular contributor to TechRadar – before leaving Future Publishing to found Wareable in 2014.
James has been at the helm of Wareable since 2014 and has become one of the leading experts in wearable technologies globally. He has reviewed, tested, and covered pretty much every wearable on the market, and is passionate about the evolving industry, and wearables helping people achieve healthier and happier lives.