We’ve gotten used to Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa adding new capabilities to her repertoire, like buying Prime-eligible products, paying credit card bills, ordering pizza, and then leading workouts to exercise off said pizza, but thus far she’s done it all from within the Echo and Echo Dot devices. That might be changing.
Lenovo, the world’s biggest PC maker, says it’s talked to Amazon about possibly using Alexa in its computers and other devices, a Lenovo executive with the inside scoop told CNET, without adding details. Amazon declined to comment.
“We consider things all the time and we’ve looked at it,” the Lenovo executive said. “But there’s nothing on the roadmap.”
Why would Amazon want to share Alexa? Because that means it can expand its own influence across more devices, and thus, be exposed to more consumers, CNET notes. And having those people shop on Amazon with Alexa, well, the benefit there is clear.
As for Lenovo, having a fancy virtual assistant on its PCs could make people interested in PCs again, as folks these days are more focused on their phones for all their computing needs (including playing video games).
Alexa is far from alone in the world of tech, of course: there’s Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant out there offering various kinds help on different devices. Cortana is now on Windows 10 PCs as of last year, and Siri will be making the move to Macs this fall.
Amazon Alexa’s new home: Your PC? [CNET]
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
No comments:
Post a Comment