What is Amazon Alexa? Amazon Alexa Review, Features

Amazon Alexa is an intelligent personal voice assistant developed by Amazon, similar to Apple's Siri and Google's home, and can support many devices.

Amazon Alexa's components

Alexa actually consists of three parts:

1. Alexa platform framework: The voice service framework provided by Amazon is the core part of Amazon;

2. Alexa Skill Kit (ASK): is a toolkit provided by Amazon to voice service application developers;

3. Alexa Voice Service (AVS): It is a service provided by Amazon to Internet-connected terminal devices and needs to be integrated into Internet-connected terminal devices; the hardware of Internet-connected terminal devices must include a microphone and a speaker.

Function

Alexa is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, playing podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real-time information such as news.

use

When facing Alexa, users can express their needs by speaking just like facing a real person. It is commonly known as the Amazon version of Siri voice assistant. But Siri is just a mobile phone application that can only be used by individual users, while Alexa is more used in homes and smart homes, and its application scenarios are wider. When using Echo, just say "Alexa" to start asking questions, including news, creating task reminders, setting alarm times or playing music, adding shopping lists, etc. At the same time, Alexa can also interact with various smart home devices to control thermostats or adjust lights.

Supported devices

Smart speakers: Amazon echo, Amazon Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, Amazon Echo Look, Amazon Echo Plus, Amazon Echo Show, sonos, etc.

TVs and media boxes: Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Element 43-Inch 4K Ultra HD Smart LED TV;

Phones and tablets: Amazon Fire and Fire HD, Huawei Mate 9, HTC U11, TCL Xess tablet, Moto X4, Moto Smart Speaker;

Laptops and Desktops: Asus Zenbook and VivoBook laptops, HP, Lenovo ThinkPad X1, Acer Aspire, Acer Aspire All-in-One Desktops;

Smart home : Amazon Dash, ecobee4, Ecobee smart thermometer, iDevices switch, etc.

Wearable devices and headphones : OV headphones, Lynx robots, iMCO CoWatch, etc.;

Cars: Ford, BMW (all 2018 models), Mini (all 2018 models), Toyota (all 2018 models), Lexus (all 2018 models), Garmin Speak, Muse by Speak Music;

Others: Roger (app), Amazon iOS and Android apps (music playback only), EchoSim (web version), etc.

Development History

- In June 2015, Amazon launched the development kit for the voice service Alexa and officially opened Echo. Device manufacturers can use the Alexa API provided by Amazon to enable their devices to support Alexa.

Amazon's smart voice assistant was originally named Echo. In August 2015, in order to distinguish it from the speaker itself, Echo was renamed Alexa, the same name as a website analysis tool owned by Amazon.

- In September 2016, Amazon launched an annual competition called the Alexa Prize to encourage American college students to develop a robot that can chat on a specific topic for more than 20 minutes. The winner will receive a $2.5 million prize from Amazon.

- In January 2018, Amazon announced that it would update the Alexa voice service into the Alexa App and officially open it to everyone.

As of February 2018, Alexa is available in 38 countries .