Amazon opens Alexa to third-party devs, aims for AI takeover - Rethink IoT

Amazon seems to be continuing its strategy of expanding Alexa from the ashes of its aborted Fire Phone project – this week expanding its third-party support for adding Alexa to other devices. While the Echo seemed like a surprise hit for the company, it's still a little baffling that it hasn't made more of an effort to sell it outside the US. But a conversational AI-based digital assistant is a very complex feat of software engineering. Running on a central cloud computing installation, the system responds to the voice-inputs recorded on the end-device – processing them and then responding to a question or command in the way it perceives to be correct. This decision can evolve over time, and take into account the fast-moving nature of web content, so that users can just as easily ask Alexa to turn down the kitchen lights as they can query a recipe or find out the latest score update for their favorite sports team.