Amazon Alexa: News

Alexa is Amazon's cloud-based voice service available on several devices made by Amazon and third-party device manufacturers. The e-commerce giant claims that "with Alexa, you can build natural voice experiences that offer a customer more intuitive ways to interact with the technology they use every day." Alexa broadly comes under the classification of an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant. Similar solutions include Google Assistant and Apple's Siri. Alexa was first introduced in 2013 and featured for the first time on the Amazon Echo smart speaker. Today, Alexa is available on the Amazon Echo platform, Fire OS, iOS, Android, Linux, and Windows. Alexa's capabilities include voice interactions, music playback, podcast streaming, playing audiobooks, providing weather traffic sports, and other real-time information including news, and making to-do lists. The voice assistant can be activated for listening to commands using the "Alexa" hotword. This hotword can be changed for every Alexa device you have. Additionally, Amazon offers a variety of voices including male, female, and celebrity voices on a regular basis. You can choose any of these voices for the Alexa service. Alexa's capabilities can be expanded by installing "skills" developed by third-party vendors for compatibility with their offerings.