Amazon today announced that it will soon roll out what it calls its most significant experience update for the Fire TV line of products yet.

“We’re always looking for ways to enhance, evolve, and reimagine the experience to usher in the future of TV,” a new post to the Amazon Fire TV blog reads. “The all-new Fire TV experience makes it even easier to find what you want to watch, with a redesigned Main Menu and a more personalized way to discover new entertainment.”

I was of the opinion that Fire TV already had the best UI among the various living room set-top boxes, so I’m a bit surprised to see that Amazon felt the need to change it this much. But the new look is certainly clean enough. If anything, it looks a bit inspired by the Google TV interface.

According to Amazon, there’s an all-new Home screen with a new Main menu that makes it easy to get into your most recently-accessed content and apps. A new Find experience that helps you search and browse by popular categories. And new personalized streaming profiles that let you create up to six profiles, each with personalized recommendations, viewing history, watch lists, preferred settings, and more.

As you should expect, the new Fire TV UI was designed with Alexa in mind, and it provides new and improved voice controls and offers to create an optional Alexa Voice Profile so that Fire TV will recognize your voice and automatically switch to your customized profile when asked.

The new Fire TV experience will be available globally on the next generation Fire TV Stick and all-new Fire TV Stick Lite later this year. Previous Fire TV devices will get the upgrade “through early next year.”

Tagged with Amazon Fire TV