Amazon Is Pulling Out All the Stops Against Apple and Google in the Voice Assistant Wars As much as Amazon’s (AMZN)  Echo home speaker/voice assistant has turned into a surprise hit and yielded a blizzard of positive media attention, the Alexa voice assistant powering Echo hardware is still in key respects at a strategic disadvantage […]

Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) is looking to students to help it grow the skill set of its smart assistant Alexa. According to a Reuters report, the Seattle-based company is paying for a year of doctoral fellowships for research related to expanding Alexa’s capabilities. The members of the Alexa Fund, as the program is known, are Carnegie

It’s still winter, and March, as the saying goes, is coming in like a lion—or a juvenile bald eagle—with snow in the forecast for the weekend. Again. We’re wrapping the week with a look at funding for 2nd Watch, Amazon Web Services’ outage, a spate of Alexa news, a look at ways game controllers are

Have you heard? Amazon’s Alexa now has 10,000 skills, or voice-activated apps, that are designed to make your life a lot easier. (Click here for a full list of commands you should be using.) The best part is they speed up everyday tasks. Instead of opening up a computer, then logging in, typing in a

Amazon has plans to release more Alexa-powered devices this year, some of which, according to recent reports, may include voice-activated voice call functionality. The devices would allow users to talk with others using Alexa-powered devices, effectively functioning as an intercom system. The news originates from a report claiming Amazon has confirmed its plans to advance

Amazon will introduce at least one more Alexa-powered device this year that will allow users to initiate phone calls with their voice, according to Recode. The device(s) can also serve as an intercom system between people on the opposite end of another Alexa-capable device, Recode reports. The new product was in beta testing as of