We may soon be living in Alexa's world

My wife and I were just settling into bed one night when Alexa, the other woman in my life, decided to make herself heard. Without being summoned, the Amazon Echo Dot at my bedside — one of the half-dozen devices that Alexa inhabits in our house — lit up its spectral blue ring, as if it had heard its triggering wake word, “Alexa.” But instead of offering help with some household chore, the voice assistant began to wail, like a child screaming in a horror-movie dream. “Huh,” I said to my wife when it was over. She said something less kind. But here’s what’s really strange: By the next morning, we had forgotten all about it. It is a measure of how thoroughly Amazon’s voice assistant has wormed herself into our lives, and into much of the culture beyond, that I never considered unplugging her after the scream. Instead I chalked the incident up to a harmless bug — one of the many mysteries of living with an artificial intelligence life form that can be summoned at a breath. (An Amazon representative offered to investigate, but said the company had never heard of such a thing happening before and did not think Alexa was even capable of making such a sound.) When Amazon unveiled Alexa three-and-a-half years ago, it was roundly jeered. Now, against all expectations, even though she’s sometimes unpredictable and unpolished, Alexa is here to stay. And that may be underplaying it; people in tech have recently begun to talk about Alexa as being more than just part of a hit gadget. Something bigger is afoot. Alexa has the best shot of becoming the third great consumer computing platform of this decade — next to iOS and Android, a computing service so ubiquitous that it sets a foundation for much of the rest of what happens in tech. It is not a sure path. Amazon could screw this up, and rivals like Google have many cards to play to curb Alexa’s rise. Amazon’s strategy — something like a mix between Google’s plan for Android and Apple’s for the iPhone — is also unusual. And there are lingering social concerns about voice assistants and, as I discovered, their sometimes creepy possibilities. How many people, really, are willing to let an always-on device in their house? Despite this, Alexa’s ubiquity is a plausible enough future that it is worth seriously pondering. In an effort to do so, I recently dived headlong into Alexa’s world. I tried just about every Alexa gadget I could get my hands on, including many not made by Amazon, such as an Alexa-enabled pickup truck, to see what life with her will be like once she is everywhere. What I found was a mess — many non-Amazon Alexa devices aren’t ready for prime time — but an inviting one.

Late-night shrieks notwithstanding, one day very soon, Alexa or something like it will be everywhere — and computing will be better for it. “We had a spectacular holiday,” Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, said when I called last month to chat about the assistant’s future. Amazon is famously cagey about sales numbers, but Limp braved a slight disclosure: “We have said we have sold tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices, but I can assure you that last year we also sold tens of millions of just Echo devices. At that scale, it is safe to now call this a category.” Limp’s distinction is confusing but important. At Amazon, Alexa lives in two places. She is part of a device category, the Echo smart speaker, which now comes in a variety of permutations, from the $49 Echo Dot to the screen-bearing Echo Show, which sells for $229. But like Google’s Android operating system, Alexa is also a piece of software that Amazon makes available for free for other device makers to put into their products. At least 50 devices are now powered by Alexa, and more keep coming. They include dozens of Echo-like smart speakers, home thermostats, light fixtures, dashboard cameras, smartphones, headphones, a smoke alarm and a very strange robot. Alexa is spreading so quickly that even Amazon can’t keep track of it. Limp said that as he wandered the floor at the CES electronics trade show in Las Vegas this year, even he was surprised by the number of different Alexa devices. “To me, that says the strategy is working,” he said. There are some costs to this strategy, which prizes speed over polish. The universe of Alexa-enabled products is shaggy. Many third-party devices get low reviews on Amazon. Many don’t include some of Alexa’s key functions — I tested devices that don’t let you set reminders, one of the main reasons to use Alexa. Technical limitations also prevent non-Amazon devices from taking advantage of some of Alexa’s best new features, like the ability to call phones or other Alexas. Limp said Amazon was aiming to fix these limitations, but conceded that its strategy necessarily led to some low-end devices. “You are right, sometimes the ramifications of this will be that some devices will be out there that are not perfect,” he said. But there are also advantages to Alexa’s model for ubiquity. Imagine if you could gain access to your smartphone on just about any screen you encountered. Move from your phone to your TV to your laptop to your car, and wherever you went, you would find all your apps, contacts and data just there, accessible through the same interface.