Alexa

Alexa, the whole center point of this chapter and the book, is the interactive voice-based personal assistant by Amazon, originally introduced with its family of Echo devices. Alexa as an assistant is oriented towards a smart home concept, hence most of its use comes from Amazon Echo, a smart speaker designed and developed to be kept in the living room of the user's home so that the user can ask it day-to-day queries about weather, food recipes, and jokes, or play interactive trivia games, set alarms, shop for day-to-day items, and much more. The following diagram shows some of the things that a user can ask Alexa:

Figure 1.14: List of some things that Alexa can help with 

The capabilities of Alexa can also be extended by installing third-party skills (similar to Google Home's third-party apps). Each third-party skill is meant to serve a specific purpose. For example, the Uber skill allows you to order a ride, the Domino's skill allows you to order a pizza—all from the comfort of your home and through the magic of your voice working together with Alexa.

As of the time of writing this, there are more than 15,000 skills available for Alexa with Uber and Lyft being the most used ones in the travel category, Pandora and Spotify for music streaming, and multiple other skills being utilized in home automation.