Amazon embeds Alexa voice assistant into shopping app on iPhone

With this new integration, you’ll be able to use Alexa wherever you are to access thousands of skills, control your smart home devices, get answers to your pressing questions, and a lot more – all with your voice.

You can likewise now utilize add-on Skills and Alexa’s smart home abilities, using the Amazon app.

Amazon announced Thursday it’s added its voice-activated assistant Alexa to its iOS shopping app.

Apple does host an Alexa app for iOS devices, but it serves as a companion to devices supporting Alexa.

Alexa was launched past year alongside Amazon’s Echo voice-controlled speaker and its latest integration suggests its capabilities of being useful beyond the Echo setup. This feature will also allow users to access Alexa’s other functions and skills including information search and third-party skills.

Simply open up the Amazon app and you’ll see a microphone icon at the top of the screen. Integration with Amazon services works, too, so you’ll be able to ask Alexa to search Amazon.com for the products you want. But that’s not the entire story though – you can even ask Alexa to play you songs straight from Amazon Music, provided you have a subscription for it.

Instead, for the first time, Amazon has brought Alexa support directly to your smartphone. The companies “flash briefing” can read the news, and Alexa can keep an eye on climate and other localized events to keep the users abreast of the happenings.

Still, Alexa can prove to be useful for those who get their shopping done via Amazon’s online store.

Amazon said the feature began rolling out today, and should be available to all users within the U.S. by sometime next week.

Amazon has already moved Alexa beyond the Echo, with the technology also available on Kindle Fire tablets.

The skills, which will be added to the Alexa service, are a Harry Potter inspired sorting hat skill which allocates Hogwarts houses to users, and a random number generator which gives a Fibonacci number when prompted.