Alexa has won CES, but it may not win the smart assistant war

Amazon doesn't have an official presence at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, but it's making no shortage of headlines thanks to its Alexa smart assistant. Don't assume, though, that the AI butler will be king forever. If you've been following the news coming out of CES this year, you'll have noticed that voice-controlled AI assistants are everywhere. Conversational interfaces, which we predicted would be a breakthrough technology in 2016, have already made a big impression on consumers, and now companies want to bake them into as many pieces of hardware as possible. Leading the pack by a wide margin is Alexa. It's made its way into third-party speakers similar to Amazon's own Echo device.