Amazon Echo Now Available at Staples, Priced at $179

AVS lets users speak to Alexa through their device’s microphone, with the assistant responding through the speakers or headphones.

The Alexa Voice Service might end up being quite an attractive option to developers, considering it’s free to use and integrate. Staples also sells other Amazon hardware like the Fire TV, the Fire TV stick, the Fire TV game controller, and several Kindle tablets on its website. Since introducing Amazon Echo, we’ve heard from developers, manufacturers, and start-ups of all sizes who want to innovate with this new technology. Commands need to be relatively simple and clear-what was the score in the Red Sox game, for example-but the expectation is that opening up the AVS to third-party developers could see Alexa become an important part of the connected world.

You can add the Roku media player to the list of devices that can be bossed about by the Amazon Echo and its built-in AI: Alexa. He did this by using the Alexa Skills Kit, the SDK that provides a programmer’s interface into the functions of the device. Apparently no experience with voice recognition or natural language processing is required, and it should only take a few hours to integrate the Voice Service into a device.

The move can help Alexa become even more useful and find itself in a much better competing against Google’s Now, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana voice-based virtual assistants.