What I learned from using Amazon Alexa for a month

When Amazon Echo with Alexa service came out in November 2014 I was skeptical. A speaker with voice recognition seemed like an unnecessary oddity. When a friend of mine purchased one in 2015, I had a chance to play with it but was unimpressed still. Alexa's SDK has been open to third party developers for a year now. As a software engineer it is important for me to keep up with emerging technologies and learn about them.