AMAZON ALEXA

        What is Alexa?

For most people, all you really have to know about Alexa is that it’s the name of the voice that comes out of Alexa-enabled speakers. Basically, Alexa is to Amazon what Siri is to Apple. Alexa is a voice that you can ask questions to and get answers, such as “What is the weather today in Chicago?” Alexa has been integrated into many of Amazon’s services and can be used with products such as the original Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Echo Spot, Echo Show, or Amazon Fire TV.

But really, what exactly is Alexa? When you ask Alexa a question, what you’re doing is communicating with a cloud-based service. Amazon has designed the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to mimic real conversations, but you’re actually using intuitive voice commands to get this service to perform specific tasks. “Alexa” is simply the “wake word” that alerts the service to start listening to your voice. For most devices, you just have to say the wake word to get a response.

According to Amazon’s Developer site, the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) lives in the cloud. Amazon’s AVS is an intelligent voice recognition and natural language understanding service. The service can be used to voice-enable any connected device that has a microphone and speaker. That’s why you’re starting to see Alexa in headphones and other devices. “Alexa is always getting smarter with new capabilities through machine learning,” Amazon’s Developer site reads.

While Alexa is the official name for Amazon’s voice assistant, you can change this wake word to “Amazon,” “Computer,” or “Echo.” That’s a useful feature, especially if your name or your partner’s or roommate’s name happens to be Alexa or something that sounds similar.


What can Alexa do?

The list of commands Alexa can understand seems to grow on a daily basis. Amazon calls these “skills,” and you can even create your own skills through Amazon Blueprints. Upon review from Amazon, you can even publish your own skills in the Amazon Skills Store for other people to use on their Alexa devices. The number of tasks that Alexa can accomplish is clearly more than we can list in this article, but here are some of our favorites:

    

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