Wheelchairs, Pringles cans, and other unlikely objects with Amazon's Alexa

You probably caught video a few weeks back of Alexa speaking through Big Mouth Billy Bass, a singing fish that got popular in the late 1990s. If you haven't seen it yet, take a moment to watch and enjoy. The animatronic fish is a good reminder that Amazon's Alexa does not just come in speakers like Amazon Echo or Echo Dot. The Alexa Voice Service (AVS) can be used to put Alexa inside a wide range of devices, and since it's in the cloud, Alexa can operate without dependency on a local device for computing power. With Amazon deep learning services, the Lex bot framework, and a smarter Alexa Skills Kit announced at AWS re:Invent this week, people can expect to see and interact with Alexa in places way beyond an Echo or animatronic fish.