Amazon's Alexa gets comfy in our homes - CNET

"At Amazon, we think the next big platform is voice," David Limp, Amazon's senior vice president of devices, said during a press event in San Francisco on Wednesday.

A trio of big Alexa announcements from Amazon...

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Alexa is among the four major digital voice assistants now on the market, with Google's Google Now, Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri also clamoring to answer your buing questions. Each one of these assistants is now traveling into more devices to help make talking, instead of typing, a much bigger part of our computing experiences. Apple's Siri started in iPhones but is now integrated into the Apple TV streaming box. Microsoft's Cortana also started in phones but now can be found inside Windows laptops, too.

From its original roughly dozen capabilities (Amazon calls them "skills"), the Echo can now perform more than 300, including tuing on and off the lights, playing Jeopardy and leading a listener through a choose-your-own-adventure tale about Batman. The Echo also can help you order new stuff from Amazon.com. All you have to do is ask -- and have a credit card on file.

Because the Echo includes microphones that are always listening, Limp on Wednesday emphasized the importance of privacy for such a device, adding that no conversation is sent to Amazon's servers until the Echo is woken up by saying "Alexa." He said that customers can also go online and delete all the saved voice commands connected to their accounts.

Amazon executives, meanwhile, seem to be just as surprised as many others about the Echo's sudden success. The Echo first became available for sale in late 2014, but the device offered so few tricks that many people hardly noticed it. This year, the device became big enough to merit its own Super Bowl commercials.

"Consumer electronics are hard," Limp told reporters Wednesday. "Roads are littered with consumer electronics failures, so when we have a hit -- and especially one like Alexa and Echo that are doing so well, so quickly -- I'm absolutely surprised."

Limp, of course, knows what such a failure can look like, since his company nearly two years ago came out with a phone, the Fire Phone, that quickly flopped.