The Exec Behind Amazon's Alexa: Full Transcript of Fortune's Interview

Amazon's voice assistant Alexa has become a hugely popular and growing business. In fact, David Limp, an Amazon senior vice president who oversees Alexa and all of its Amazon devices, says that Alexa is rapidly adding "skills," with more than 1,000 people working on it. On Tuesday, at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference, Limp spoke to Fortune's Adam Lashinsky about the inspiration for Alexa (hint: Think Star Trek) and the origin of the name to where the business is heading. Here is the lightly-edited transcript. Dave Limp: The device business is less about building hardware for customers and more about building services behind that hardware. So the original vision of Kindle was to deliver any book ever written in less than 60 seconds, and that was all about creating a cloud-based service that had a great catalogue of books, great selection, and great prices. And as we've rolled out devices since then, everything from Fire TV to, as you mentioned, Echo and Alexa and everything in between, it's about creating that backend service that constantly improves and adds value for customers, and isn't just a gadget but instead a full end to end service that can benefit what customers want.