Alexa lives in Amazon's new wireless speaker unit, Echo, where the web-connected voice assistant can fire up playlists, draw up shopping lists, pull up newscasts and answer any question posed to her by the family.
Obviously not fazed by the crash and burn of its first smartphone, Fire, Amazon is busy cranking out new hardware and devices for the home and consumer lifestyle.
The cylindrical Echo, with was born without a Fire surname, is just over nine inches in height and three inches in diameter. The lone two buttons let users toggle the power on and off or mute voice commands -- which may prove especially helpful in homes already occupied by someone named "Alexa."
The Echo unit is rimmed by an array of seven microphones, and it uses beam-forming to home in on voices emanating from any direction. The microphone array's far-field technology can discern sounds near and far, even when the unit is playing music.
The web-connected speaker unit taps into Amazon's Web Services cloud platform via Wi-Fi, which the online retailer says enables Alexa to learn and become adaptive. Just speaking to the unit helps it adapt to a user's speech, including building out a vocabulary.
The connection to Amazon Web Services empowers the unit with intelligence that rivals Apple's Siri. Users can call on Alexa and the digital voice assistant will pull up whatever factoid or news report it can find.
The Echo sources music and information from local radio stations, Wikipedia, NPR, ESPN, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Amazon's Prime Music and Amazon Music Library. Users can also stream music from mobile devices through the Echo, using a Bluetooth connection.
Users can also call on Alexa to set timers and alarms or fill shopping and to-do lists. Amazon says it will build on new features and updates to Echo units via Amazon Web Services.
To streamline the Echo's setup, Amazon has released a companion app for the unit. The app is available on Android on Fire OS, but desktop and iOS users can access the setup wizard through their browsers.
The Amazon Echo retails at $199, but is being offered to Prime users for $99. The discount on the Echo for Amazon Prime users may be another lure to bring more customers aboard the company's value meal of digital media services.
To sweeten its Prime membership and make it more attractive to nonsubscribers, Amazon recently took the cap off its cloud for image storage. Prime subscribers can upload an unlimited amount of images to Amazon Cloud, though a cap remains in place for videos.
