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We use our voice assistants for a lot of different tasks, but it seems that companies are always finding ways to make them more useful. Amazon wants to use its in-house voice assistant to help the environment. Now, you can use Alexa to plant trees in different locations.
According to an announcement by the company, Amazon partnered with One Tree Planted to help reforest parts of the world. Through this partnership, Amazon will plant trees at the behest of Alexa users. By simply summoning Alexa and saying something like “Alexa grow a tree”, you’ll be able to donate $1 to plant a tree. After your donation is made, One Tree Planted will plant a tree for you.
Amazon didn’t mention any sort of limit to the number of trees that you can plant, so you can be generous and plant as many of them as you want. If you want to keep track of how many trees you’ve planted, you can do so on your Amazon account.
Folks can plant trees with Alexa, but it doesn’t stop there
Along with this program, Amazon is also donating $1 million to One Tree Planted as a whole. This is to help the nonprofit plant a million trees between now and December 2022. While you can plant as many trees as you want via Alexa, you’re not likely to say “Alexa, plant one million trees”; thankfully, Amazon has got you covered. This initiative will help with reforestation and forest fire prevention in four locations.
The first location is Centre County, Pennsylvania. The companies hope to reforest about 34 acres of land in the county, as the area is unable to regrow its own.
The next location is California. With the raging forest fires in 2018, the funds will help foresters prepare for and prevent forest fires and floods in the future.
Over in India, the funds will help plant fruit trees to fight hunger in marginalized states. This includes the states of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Odisha, and West Bengal.
Lastly, the funds will help plant trees along the pacific northwest. These trees will house salmon which is a primary source of food for orca.