What Is Amazon Alexa and What Can It Do?

Alexa is Amazon's all-knowing, interactive voice assistant. Found in Amazon's Echo speakers, smart thermostats, soundbars, and lamp and light lineups, as well as directly on your phone through the Alexa app, Alexa can do quick math for you, start your favorite playlists, check the news and weather, and control many of your devices. So what is Alexa? Why should you choose it? What does it do and where is it used? Let's take a look together!

What Is Alexa? 2022

For most people, all you really need to know about Alexa is that it's the name of the voice coming out of Alexa-enabled speakers. Basically, Alexa is to Amazon what Siri is to Apple. Alexa is a voice you can ask questions like "What's the weather like in Chicago today?" and get answers from. Alexa is integrated into many of Amazon's services and can be used with products like 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 designed Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to mimic real conversation, but what you're actually doing is using intuitive voice commands to get the service to perform specific tasks. "Alexa" is the "wake word" that prompts the service to start listening to your voice. On most devices, all you need to do is say the wake word to get a response.

According to Amazon's Developer site, 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 a speaker. That's why you're starting to see Alexa show up in headphones and other devices. Amazon's Developer site says, "Alexa is always getting smarter with new capabilities through machine learning."

While Alexa is the official name of Amazon's voice assistant, you can change this wake word to "Amazon," "Computer," or "Echo." This is a handy feature, especially if your name, or the name of your partner or roommate, is Alexa or something that sounds like it.

Why Alexa?

Apple has Siri. Google Home has Google Assistant, which comes to life when you say "OK, Google." Amazon has Alexa. But why? According to David Limp, the Amazon executive who oversaw the service's development, the name "Alexa" was chosen for a few reasons. First, the name "Alexa" harks back to the Library of Alexandria, which tried to gather all the world's knowledge. Amazon is trying to do the same thing. Alexa is always learning, but in theory it should be a flawless source of information.

More practically, the service was named Alexa because it contains the uncommon "X" sound. Since this service is voice-activated, Amazon wanted to pick a name that wouldn't be confused with other words that could accidentally wake the device: "We looked at a handful of names, and the name matters more for the personality it creates around the persona than it does for this cloud-based computer science voice computer. But there's also computer science behind it," Limp said. "If any of you have Echoes, you know that it only wakes up when it hears the word 'Alexa,' and the phonetics of that word and the way that word is parsed, and the fact that it has a hard consonant with the 'X' in it, are important to make sure it only wakes up when intended. And so, the combination of those two things let us narrow it down to Alexa," he said.

Where Can I Use Alexa?

To use Alexa, you'll need a device that integrates voice technology. This usually means an Amazon device like an Echo, Echo Dot, or Echo Show, but this cloud-based personal voice assistant is also integrated into Echo Auto and some third-party systems. Devices like Fire TV and some third-party devices are also compatible with Alexa: the Ecobee Switch+ light switch, the LG InstaView refrigerator, headphones (like Echo Buds and some Plantronics models), and the aforementioned Sonos One speaker.

Alexa has also become the hub for many smart home systems, including Wink, SmartThings, and Logitech Harmony. Since Alexa can pair with hubless devices like WeMo switches and Nest thermostats, you can also use the voice assistant to build out your smart home setup.

What Can Alexa Do?

The list of commands Alexa can understand keeps growing every day. Amazon calls these "skills," and you can even create your own skills through Amazon Blueprints. After review by Amazon, you can even publish your own skills on the Amazon Skills Store for other people to use on their Alexa devices. The number of tasks Alexa can accomplish is far more than we could list in this article, but here are some of our favorites:

• It can walk you through a recipe for a meal step by step.
• It can read a book of your choice.
• It can save and remind you of movie showtimes and your sports schedules.
• It can list nearby restaurants for you.
• It can pay your bills.

Alexa is also useful for helping people build bedtime and morning routines. You just need to assign a single command, and that specific command can trigger a whole series of events. For example, saying "Alexa, good night" can trigger the device to turn off all the lights in the house, arm the security system, and turn on the ambient noise machine at the same time. You can also make your routine quite specific; if you want, you can program Alexa to turn on your preferred lights, wait 10 minutes, and then turn on the coffee maker. If you wake up earlier than your partner, you can use Alexa's whisper mode, so it communicates in a whisper and listens closely for your whispers as well.

Does Amazon Alexa Support Turkish?

Alexa doesn't support the Turkish language yet. Echo products also still aren't sold in Türkiye.

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