Amazon Partners With Chipmakers To Push Alexa Voice Assistant Into More Devices

Amazon wants to put its digital voice assistant, Alexa, into as many devices as possible. For help, it's partnering up with more chipmakers to make it easier for outside developers to get Alexa up and running on devices like speakers, thermostats and wearables. On Wednesday, Conexant, maker of audio processing chips, announced it's releasing a development kit approved by Alexa Voice Services, which is Amazon's program for hooking up third-party products to Alexa in its cloud. The kit provides hardware developers with two microphones and a processor loaded with software for picking up the "Alexa" wake word. The kit is supposed to enable devices to recognize the wake word in noisy environments. Similarly, chipmaking giant Intel announced last week that it would be integrating Alexa into its smart home platform kit, called the Smart Home Hub.