Amazon's plan to put Alexa everywhere is extending from homes to hotels and, soon, the Mediterranean. It will bring Alexa and the various Echo devices to Spain and Italy later this year. Sonos and Bose will also start selling their Alexa-enabled devices in those countries before the year's out. In the meantime, Amazon is encouraging developers to start creating skills in Italian and Spanish. There's no use having a smart voice assistant on hand if it can't do a whole lot, after all.

Amazon just dropped its umpteenth Alexa skill, this time for Destiny 2 fans. Already in the tens of thousands, the digital assistant's tricks span shopping, news, smart home controls, pop trivia, kiddie pastimes, and now video games. But while a growing number of regions have access to Amazon's Echo family of smart speakers (including recent additions India and Japan), they're still missing in some spots. Now, it seems Alexa's global expansion is picking up speed, as the digital helper is (officially) heading Down Under. Amazon has announced that Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices will land in Australia and New Zealand in early 2018.

How often has any piece of consumer technology had as eventful a year as 2017 has been for Amazon's Alexa voice service and Echo hardware? Consider the evidence: A year ago, Amazon boasted that there were 4,000 Alexa skills–tasks the service can perform, from setting a Nest thermostat to playing Jeopardy–up from 135 the previous January. Today, the count stands at 25,000. Alexa can now make phone and video calls, distinguish between the voices of multiple household members, and display information on screens, none of which it was able to do when the year began. In August, Amazon and Microsoft even announced that Alexa and Cortana would be able to talk to each other, a first-of-its-kind arrangement in the voice-assistant market.

In the Game of Thrones-like artificial intelligence competition between Houses Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the company most reticent to speak about its technology has usually been the one that ships planeloads full of stuff to consumers, hosts thousands of companies in its data centers, greenlit Catastrophe, and has a breakaway hit product that answers questions, plays music, and 4,998 or so other things. Yes, for some time, Amazon has been even more shrouded than the famously secret Apple, which opened up about its machine learning programs earlier this year. Lately, however, Amazon's head scientist and vice president of Alexa, Rohit Prasad, has been speaking up in public, making the case for his company's prowess in voice recognition and natural language understanding. Alexa, of course, is the conversational platform that supports that aforementioned hit product, Echo. On Wednesday Prasad gave an Alexa "State of the Union" address at the Amazon Web Services conference in Las Vegas, announcing an improved version of the Alexa Skills Kit, which helps developers create the equivalent of apps for the platform; a beefed-up Alexa Voice Service, which will make it easier to transform third-party devices like refrigerators and cars into Alexa bots; a partnership with Intel; and the Alexa Accelerator that, with the startup incubator Techstars, will run a 13-week program to help newcomers build Alexa skills.

In the Game of Thrones-like artificial intelligence competition between Houses Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the company most reticent to speak about its technology has usually been the one that ships planeloads full of stuff to consumers, hosts thousands of companies in its data centers, greenlit Catastrophe, and has a breakaway hit product that answers questions, plays music, and 4,998 or so other things. Yes, for some time, Amazon has been even more shrouded than the famously secret Apple, which opened up about its machine learning programs earlier this year. Lately, however, Amazon's head scientist and vice president of Alexa, Rohit Prasad, has been speaking up in public, making the case for his company's prowess in voice recognition and natural language understanding. Alexa, of course, is the conversational platform that supports that aforementioned hit product, Echo. Today Prasad is giving an Alexa "State of the Union" address at the Amazon Web Services conference in Las Vegas, announcing an improved version of the Alexa Skills Kit, which helps developers create the equivalent of apps for the platform; a beefed-up Alexa Voice Service, which will make it easier to transform third-party devices like refrigerators and cars into Alexa bots; a partnership with Intel; and the Alexa Accelerator that, with the startup incubator Techstars, will run a 13-week program to help newcomers build Alexa skills.

Microsoft's rumored Home Hub was once thought to be a device rivaling Amazon Echo or Google Home. A new report suggests it will instead be a Windows 10 software service aimed at families, complete with a new Cortana assistant that will run on upcoming Windows 10 PCs. Just like in real families, Home Hub will put an emphasis on sharing, according to the source of the report, Windows Central. The site said it would have a communal, interactive calendar, presumably touch-based like Windows 10's current Calendar app. Microsoft may also be planning to create a family-friendly version of its Cortana digital assistant that will be the primary, voice-driven interface.