If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA TODAY's newsroom and any business incentives. With Amazon Prime Day coming up, there will be lots of deals Prime members can only get by ordering through an Amazon Alexa device. If you don't already have an Echo or Fire device, now is the perfect chance to get one for a great low price. The Amazon Tap, Amazon's portable bluetooth speaker, gives you a great way to listen to your music anywhere you are.

If you're on a mission to be the best host in the neighborhood, you need smart home tech on your side. There are a variety of useful products that can help you throw an amazing party, from app-controlled slow cookers to smart cocktail mixers, and you're probably going to want all of them. Whether you need to dim the lights to sing "Happy Birthday" or want to spruce things up with fun colors, you'll get all the functionality you need with the Philips Hue Starter Kit. The kit comes with three smart light bulbs and a smart hub, and it's compatible with Amazon Alexa, so you can use voice control to adjust your party lights. Speaking of Alexa, the Amazon Tap is perfect for avid entertainers.

Amazon's voice assistant, Alexa, is infiltrating your home, your beach trips and even your ride to work. Now that there are four ways to interact with Alexa -- with the Tap, Echo and Dot devices, and with the Amazon Fire TV -- you might find yourself talking to her more often. The list of commands is expanding rapidly, as is the number of third-party services and devices that Alexa officially (and unofficially) supports. Here is the (almost) complete list of Amazon Alexa commands. By default, Amazon's connected speakers have the same wake word.

Amazon recently released two new software updates: one for its Amazon Alexa voice assistant and another for its Amazon Tap portable speakers. The updates come with Outlook.com According to The Verge, Amazon silently updated its intelligent virtual assistant, so Outlook.com Henceforth, Alexa clients can ask the voice assistant "What's on my calendar?" The Alexa update has been quietly seeded to the software of the AI assistant, so there's no need for users to manually update their Alexa-powered devices.

Pizza Hut, recognized as the pizza restaurant company which serves and delivers more pizzas than any other pizza company in the world, is expanding its ordering capabilities to include Alexa Voice Service on Amazon Echo, Amazon Tap, Echo Dot, Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablets. With a simple phrase, and not a single phone or laptop lifted, Pizza Hut's new skill brings ease and convenience to the ordering experience for pizza-loving homes across the country. The Pizza Hut skill differs from any pizza brand in the space by providing Alexa users with the convenience of ordering not only your favourites and past orders, but also directly from a menu of the most popular items from Pizza Hut. "Pizza Hut has and always will be devoted to serving customers pizza anywhere, anyhow, and anyway, and using the latest technology is no exception," says Doug Terfehr, Senior Director, Public Relations and Partnerships for Pizza Hut. "Amazon is great to work with and the Pizza Hut skill on Alexa is unlike any other pizza brand with flexible ordering from a menu of options without lifting a finger."

Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) had the perfect answer to the potential threat posed by Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) upcoming Google Home intelligent home assistant. Amazon's prompt answer was to just sell a 20-off Alexa-powered Amazon Tap Bluetooth speaker/smart home assistant. In fact, Apple's (NASDAQ:AAPL) alleged upcoming Siri Speaker will also likely get a beat-down from Amazon Echo's cheaper variations. Deep discounting is Amazon's deadly weapon against any threat to its popular brands of smart devices. All the cheapo Fire tablets, Fire TV console/stick products, and Alexa-powered speakers it sells are mere customer recruitment avenues for Amazon's online marketplace.

As a thank you to customers, Amazon is offering a sale on its Echo and Dot for today only. It seems like every week the Amazon Echo is in the news for one reason or another. But instead of adding new features or announcing new hardware partners, this week Amazon has decided to do something a bit more exciting and a lot more rare: put the Amazon Echo and Amazon Tap on sale. The sale is in celebration of being recognized by the Reputation Institute, which named Amazon the "No. 1 Most Reputable Company in the U.S." Amazon is proudly displaying the award in banners on its homepage, and to say thank you to its customers, it's offering the Echo and Tap for 15 percent off list price--for one day only. That means you can get the Echo for 153.71 instead of 179.99, and the Tap for 111.01 instead of 129.99.

Like the Echo, the Tap takes the form of a black cylinder with a mesh exterior that reminds me of old-school speaker covers. Because on-the-go speakers are constantly being shuttled in and out of bags, though, they also need to be able to withstand some contact with the ground. Amazon doesn't specifically claim that the Tap is rugged, but it sells an optional silicone case for 20 that Amazon says adds some extra protection against bumps and drops (it also adds a handle, to boot). For my part, while I didn't actually drop the speaker on purpose, it was solid enough to handle a few tumbles. Continuing our brief tour, there are track and volume controls up top, meaning if a song comes on and the phone that's streaming to the speaker isn't available, you can still quickly skip that expletive-filled track you forgot to remove from your playlist before your parents' barbecue.

Sunday morning, lying in bed after a wine-soaked Saturday in Monterey, I rolled over and did what I do most mornings (no, not that): I asked Alexa the weather. Normally, my Amazon Echo chirps to life at the sound of its name and provides a quick forecast, but this, nothing. Which was weird, because the Echo always hears me. Then the wine fog cleared and I remembered oh, right, this is the Amazon Tap. I reached over and pressed the button on the side of the cylindrical black speaker on my nightstand, and five lights blinked blue.

The good: Amazon's Alexa voice interface can now work in new places The Amazon Echo, an Internet-connected smart speaker that can answer owners' verbal questions and requests, has quietly become one of the hottest gadgets of the past few months. And with the arrival of the new Tap and Dot Amazon is taking the Echo's smarts, powered by a Siri-like software called "Alexa," and packing them into two new form factors. The Tap is a smaller, mobile version of the Echo, whose power cord keeps it stuck indoors. The Dot is meant to connect to your existing sound system, bringing Echo's smarts to the speakers you already own. Both devices function almost identically to the Echo.