Amazon Echo: The four hard problems Amazon had to solve to make it work ZDNet

Amazon's aim is to have Alexa indistinguishable from a human voice. Dave Limp, Amazon's SVP of device and services business is standing in front of an image of the bridge of the starship Enterprise, explaining the inspiration for Amazon's surprise hit Echo device. "A lot of people wondered what was the inspiration for this vision, it really was this, this cultural icon it started here with the tap on the lapel to talk to the computer. And later in the Star Trek series you could be anywhere on the starship Enterprise and you could talk to the computer and she would respond quickly with an answer," he says. With a 100M investment fund and the opening up of cloud service APIs and an SDK, Alexa and the Echo could become the brains of your home automation and IoT network.