Amazon's Echo steals a march in the race for artificial intelligence

When it was first announced to a sceptical tech press months after a flop phone, the Echo was dismissed separately as a joke and a privacy nightmare. Now the latter may still prove to be the case (the Echo is always listening, and logs every sentence spoken to it), but a joke it is clearly not. In fact many analysts now believe that Amazon has one hand on the future that comes after the smartphone. Alexa is not the only, or even the first, voice-activated virtual assistant – Apple, Google and Microsoft have had their own for years – but it is the first that consumers have truly embraced. While taking out a smartphone in public and speaking to it – as one must with Apple's Siri or Google's Assistant – is awkward, and often slower than simply using a touchscreen, talking to a device in the comfort of one's own home is decidedly less uncomfortable.