It’s been sometime since the launch of Amazon’s Alexa. I’m pretty sure you know about it. However, if you don’t, it’s a virtual assistant similar to Siri, Google Now, Google Assistant, and Cortana.
However, Alexa wasn’t first released on a smartphone like the other assistants, it was released along with Amazon’s Echo, a home speaker which has a microphone and Alexa installed on it.
Echo helps you with your small day-to-day activities just like the other assistants (lot of repetition, right? Oh, also the words!). It can play music, provide weather information, traffic information and a lot more. If you know about other virtual assistants, well, then you what Alexa is capable of and how it works.
As I mentioned earlier, Alexa was first released on a home device (or a speaker), the Echo, but it was later added to other devices – tablets, smartwatches, and few other experimental categories.
Amazon wants to up the game, it wants to put “Alexa” on many more platforms. So, the company opened up the Alexa API, over a year ago, and now the company is partnering with Intel to help manufacturers to integrate Alexa into their devices with ease.
The plan is to, release reference design of a connected speaker, like the Echo, so that manufacturers can follow the design to create their own devices. Intel and Amazon, said that they plan to release the reference designs in the first quarter of 2017.
It will be interesting to see Alexa on more devices, however, Echo is the most popular Alexa device (for now).
Other companies are also trying and have also, to follow the footsteps of Amazon, to create a home assistant. Google, the internet behemoth, released Google Home earlier this year along with Google Assistant.
Google Home is pretty cool, it also takes advantage of Google’s vast amount of information. However, I still like the design of the Echo, the metallic looking body compared to the plastic, room freshener styled device.