Making Sense of Amazon’s Alexa Spaghetti Strategy -- Bloomberg

Meanwhile, if you're looking for a Cortana-based smart speaker, see Tip: Harman Kardon Invoke is Just $50 at Best Buy (Thurrott)...

"Amazon is racing the likes of Google, Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. to position its technology at the center of our Jetsons-like home of the future, where everything from the washing machine to the thermostat can be controlled with voice commands. Amazon helped to pioneer this concept with the introduction of the Echo in 2014. Last week’s new products, designed to extend its advantage, fall into three main categories.

The first and most obvious constitutes the new kinds of Alexa-equipped devices aimed at consumers, like better-sounding Echo speakers, a home security camera and a wall clock receptive to verbal commands. The more Alexa stuff Amazon seeds into the market and into our lives, the stronger its case that Alexa—and not Siri or the Google Assistant—has become a ubiquitous new computing platform."

Making Sense of Amazon’s Alexa Spaghetti Strategy -- Bloomberg