https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/20/amazon-updates-the-echo-plus-so-it-can-control-the-smart-home-when-the-internet-goes-down/

Amazon today is giving its premium smart home-ready Echo Plus device a notable update. The device, which includes a smart home hub built into the Echo, is now getting a new fabric design, and a temperature sensor. However, what’s more interesting is the addition something Amazon calls “local voice control.” What this means is that if the internet goes down, you’ll still be able to use Alexa to control your smart home devices.

As the company explained this morning at an event in Seattle, a hub that works with a cloud-based system can often run into trouble when internet access becomes spotty or unavailable. So what the company did to address this is build in a new capability, local voice control, that takes the best of its natural language understanding and its automatic speech recognition, and runs it all locally on the device.