Alexa is a virtual helper that you can talk to. She can play music, answer your questions, run your smart home, and use your favourite services to keep you safe, informed, connected, and engaged. She works for Amazon and is also your personal shopper.
Alexa lives in the cloud and can be reached through more and more smart speakers and other devices that can talk to Alexa. Here, You will read more about what is Alexa?
Alexa’s birth.
Science fiction gave Alexa ideas: David Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president who managed the project, said that the people who made Alexa wanted to make it more like the computer on Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise. She first appeared in 2014 with the Echo smart speaker.
Alexa’s name is meant to sound good and also remind people of Egypt’s Ancient Library of Alexandria.
How does Alexa work?
Alexa works like the software on your phone, but she doesn’t use apps. Instead, she uses “skills.” Like your smartphone, Alexa comes with a lot of skills and you can choose to use others if you want to. Amazon already has more than 25,000 skills, and many of them are from names you use often. That group keeps getting bigger every day.
Among Alexa’s most-used skills are the following:
- Put on some music
- Tell people about the news
- Look at the weather
- Give news about sports
- Put podcasts on
- Listen to live radio
- You can run your smart home.
- Take care of your plans and lists.
- Call phones and other gadgets that work with Alexa
- Set clocks and timers.
- Listen to books
- Find out about area businesses
- Answer the questions
- Do your maths.
- Tell tales
- Take care of games
- Make jokes.
- Call for a ride
- Get dinner
- Look for recipes
- Teach history.
- Amazon is a store
Take Alexa home
If you want to use Alexa as your digital helper, you’ll need a device that works with Alexa. For most people today, that’s a smart speaker like Amazon’s Echo devices.
The companion app, which you can get from the Apple, Google Play, and Amazon app shops, lets you set up, customise, and control Alexa. You can get it as a web app at alexa.amazon.com as well.
Along with many other administrative jobs, the app lets you:
- Connect gadgets that work with Alexa.
- Set your usual services, like the calendar and music streaming services you like best, and connect the accounts that go with them.
- You can see and change your timers, alarms, notes, and lists.
- Look at your skills and learn new ones.
- Speakers for multiple rooms and smart home gadgets for controlling a lot of things at once
- Get your flash report ready.
What Alexa did.
Digital helpers are about to become the next big thing in technology, after smartphones. Google (with Google Assistant), Apple (with Siri), Microsoft (with Cortana), and Samsung (with Bixby) are all trying to catch up to Alexa, who was the first big player in the market.
More than 7% of American homes now have a smart speaker. This is because digital helpers are becoming very popular very quickly. Analysts think that number will go up ten times by 2020, which is only two years from now. In the meantime, Alexa still has more than 70% of that market.
And she is leaving a mark around the world: Amazon said in December 2017 that Echo devices would be available in 80 new countries as part of a big international expansion. Amazon had sold tens of millions of Echo family devices with Alexa by the end of the 2017 Christmas season.
Even though they are new, digital helpers are already changing the way people behave. Nearly 75% of people who answered Dashbot’s poll said they used a voice assistant at least once a day, and almost 60% said they used one more than once. Only 20% of those people said their helpers didn’t change how they behaved or what they did every day.
Businesses in all kinds of fields are facing both threats and possibilities because of these changes in behaviour. Millennials already use voice tools to buy things (40% of them), and by 2020, more than half of them will do so.
As the number of people who use Alexa grows, her technology will also get better. More companies will add skills to Alexa in order to take advantage of changing customer habits and a new market. This will make the experience better for users and help her grow.
Alexa is getting better every day. Her fascinating journey of development is what gave us the idea for The Assistant, and we can’t wait for you to join us.