Amazon’s boatload of new Echo devices move further beyond the phone
Amazon is finding its stride with its Alexa digital assistant, putting inside lots of devices and environments.
Maybe it’s good that Amazon got smartphones out of its system back in 2014 with the ill-fated Fire phone. It may have cleared the decks and let the company’s best minds think about other things–other devices, different embodiments of artificial intelligence, and different human/machine interfaces–like natural language. While Apple’s ecosystem still rotates around the iPhone, Amazon’s is about an ever-growing number of specialized end points for the Alexa brain.