In November 2014 Amazon introduced the Echo, a cylindrical smart speaker built around a voice assistant named Alexa. Amazon’s own press center, in a June 2015 release announcing that Echo was becoming available to all customers, describes Echo as “a new category of device designed around your voice,” one that is “always on, hands-free, and fast,” and explains that “Echo uses on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word,” after which “it lights up and streams audio to the cloud.”
Where Siri lived on a phone you held, Alexa lived in the room. You spoke the wake word, asked a question or gave a command, and the device answered out loud, all without touching anything. This ambient, always-available model defined a new product category, the smart speaker, and put a microphone-equipped AI assistant on kitchen counters and bedside tables in millions of homes.
Amazon also opened Alexa to outside developers through “skills,” third-party voice apps, turning the assistant into a platform rather than a single product. That ecosystem strategy, combined with aggressive pricing, helped Amazon build an early lead in the home assistant market.
For business readers, Alexa extended the consumer AI wave from the pocket into the home and raised the stakes on the privacy questions that come with always-listening devices. It showed that voice could be a primary interface, and that the company controlling the assistant could also control a new channel into the household.