Alexa Is coming To Amazon’s iPhone App

Are you a fan of Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant?

According to several media reports this move will eventually help boost the ecommerce giant’s business as there has been an increasing number of tech enthusiasts filling their homes with Alexa enabled devices. Users will need to hit the microphone icon at the top of the Amazon app for iPhone to wake Alexa up. This icon is dedicated to Alexa, so users have to press it to summon the AI assistant. This new functionality for the Amazon app goes beyond standard Alexa voice support, as it also lets you control any compatible smart home devices and take advantage of Alexa skills.

What can Alexa do on iOS devices? Your options will be more limited, but include such things as searching for items to purchase, reordering things, adding products to your cart, and tracking orders. You can also track your orders by saying “Track my last order”.

Participants also got the opportunity to tour Amazon’s drone development lab in Cambridge that is developing Prime Air – a delivery system created to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones. Just say “Play the Beatles” or “Play my Kindle book”.

This could gravitate more sales of the units once individuals get settled with Alexa. That means that you will always have to open the app to use it – at which point you may as well just type in a search.

Alexa’s presence on iOS could make people more comfortable using it altogether. Then there are the usual ones like defining words, completing conversations with smart answers, checking the news, weather, traffic and making simple calculations.

With that being said, the Amazon app is a quick and easy way to turn your iPhone into an “Echo” if you can put up with the downsides.

Thousands of Alexa developers can now build and host most Alexa skills for free using Amazon Web Services (AWS), thanks to a newly released Amazon program.

With Alexa joining Microsoft’s Cortana in challenging Siri on Apple’s own turf, it brings up the question for consumers of whether it’s worth installing multiple voice assistants on their iPhones. However, uninstalling the main Alexa app might be a bad idea now since it still is required to change default settings, etc.

When will Alexa arrive for iOS devices?

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