Amazon adds Alexa to its main shopping app

Amazon's virtual assistant just got a much wider audience. The company announced it's integrating Alexa into its main shopping app on iPhone, starting today with a full rollout expected by next week. The assistant can do more than just provide a voice interface to Amazon's retail store, however – it can also control your smart home, play your music or Kindle books, answer questions, check the news and weather, and take advantage of Alexa's extensions, known as Skills. Basically, it's a mobile version of Alexa that you can use even without Amazon hardware, like an Echo speaker or Fire TV. It may seem a bit odd to think of using a virtual assistant via a shopping app rather than, say, the existing Alexa mobile app.