Amazon's Alexa is a virtual assistant meant to be utilized via voice rather than typing or clicking.

It was initially released to the public in November of 2014 alongside the Amazon Echo

Smart Speaker, designated smart because it contained a microphone that allowed you to speak to

Alexa through it, which in turn would allow the virtual assistant to play music, set timers, and buy

things for you on the Amazon marketplace, alongside other simple microphone-enabled powers.

At the time of the Echo's release, that collection of other things was fairly sparse, a total of

just 13 things all told, but like Apple's introductory iPhone model,

that limited feature set was not meant to last. The hardware and the operating system it hosted

was meant to be the basis of an entire ecosystem, a platform upon which other companies

and individuals could build whatever they liked, utilizing Alexa and the many devices that hosted Alexa as

portals through which to access their accounts and these skills, which is what Amazon calls apps

made for Alexa-enabled devices. Google released their Google Assistant software two years later

in 2016, a direct competitor to Alexa in many ways,

though with an arguably larger variety of access points right out the door, due to Google's

expansive reach through their many websites and apps and their Android and Chrome ecosystems.

The Google Assistant worked in almost exactly the same manner as Alexa, and the consumer-facing

business model

seemed to be similar as well. Sell a bunch of affordable, often at cost, often quite well-designed,

and beautiful pieces of gadgetry to users, and then assume those users will utilize those gadgets

in ways that will help your bottom line. The hardware and virtual assistance were not themselves

profit-seeking endeavors, in other words, but rather means of amplifying existing profit-seeking

efforts, and perhaps getting ahead of the pack when it comes to future offerings that haven't

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