'Alexa, please book a hotel room for me.' Now, the virtual assistant can

Sure, Alexa looks up things and answers questions for you. But as of Tuesday, you can ask the virtual personal assistant inside Amazon's Echo to make hotel reservations for you too. It's a Kayak-driven application that could rock the travel-booking world as more consumers shift to using their voice instead of their fingers when using cellphones and tablets. Kayak developed the interface that right now applies only to hotel bookings through its website. To use voice-command reservations, you first have to tell Alexa, which comes with Amazon's Echo voice-enabled speaker, who you are and link up your Kayak account.