Amazon unveiled some new products that make smart homes look much more affordable and mainstream. At its annual fall product launch event, Amazon showed off several new products. One is a new mapping feature that uses the lidar features found in the cameras of certain iPhones from the 12 Pro onward to automatically map out the layout of your home. This makes it significantly easier and more intuitive to know what device or devices you are controlling and see the basic status of all the devices at once. Amazon also enhanced its Alexa digital assistant with some of the same kind of generative AI features, which makes it more responsive, more creative, and sounds much better. On the hardware side, Amazon also unveiled a new device called the Echo Hub that’s meant to serve as a master control hub for all your smart devices, allowing you to see, control, and automate them.