What is Amazon Alexa?
If you have used amazon products like the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or the Amazon Fire TV, you may have encountered a certain feature that comes shipped with them. This feature I’m referring to is Alexa, Amazon’s version of Apple’s Siri that is sure to be a welcome assistant for you.
As Amazon’s counterpart to Siri, Alexa is a voice-activated assistant that functions through conversational means. Meaning, when you ask Alexa a question or make a request, she will do it. How this is done is through the innovative use of cloud technology. The Alexa voice service lives in the cloud and has been designed to be an intelligent voice recognition service. As you use Alexa, she gets smarter and attains new capabilities through machine learning. Alexa learns through the commands you give it. As you use Alexa, the number commands (or “skills” as Amazon puts it) grows larger. Among all the skills Alexa has, some are: finding and giving step by step directions of recipes, narrating a kindle book, ordering food, and much more. Besides these basic commands, Alexa also has the ability to learn “routines” or commands set by the user. For example, saying “Alexa, goodnight” can be used to turn off all the lights in your home. It doesn’t end there, in the future, Amazon is even adding features like frustration detection so that Alexa can know if you’re frustrated with her.
Alexa is ready to assist you in every way she can. With all of these features available to you, Alexa is not merely a voice service, but your own, personalized assistant.
