CES 2018: Inside the Lab Where Amazon's Alexa Takes Over The World | WIRED

The Alexa inside story; on a related note, see Google is introducing a new Smart Display platform (The Verge)

"While one team at Amazon works on the Echo products themselves—including the Echo Spot, Show, Dot, Plus, and probably a bunch more since you started reading this sentence—and another works on the Alexa service itself, a different team is working on engineering Alexa's world takeover. While Apple and Google offer access to their assistants slowly and methodically, Amazon has flung the doors off their hinges and let anyone in. The company knows the path to success is not just in Echo devices, and that Amazon can't possibly make every gadget anyone wants to use. So they've created a new division called Alexa Voice Services, which builds hardware and software with the aim of making it stupendously easy to add Alexa into whatever ceiling fan, lightbulb, refrigerator, or car someone might be working on. "You should be able to talk to Alexa no matter where you're located or what device you're talking to," says Priya Abani, Amazon's director of AVS enablement. "We basically envision a world where Alexa is everywhere.""

CES 2018: Inside the Lab Where Amazon's Alexa Takes Over The World | WIRED