A microwave is only the beginning. Amazon wants Alexa everywhere

Amazon will not make huge amounts of money with its new $ 60 Alexa controlled microwave oven. Or the wall clock controlled by Alexa that only regulates timers. In fact, taking advantage of its growing selection of Alexa and Echo devices might be irrelevant.

The company is working on something bigger and potentially more lucrative.

Amazon wants her vocal assistant Alexa to be an invisible and unavoidable presence that is always with us, like a bright shadow. And he's trying to do it without the must-have gadget we're already taking everywhere: our phones.

On Thursday, Amazon announced 13 new gadgets adjacent to Echo and Echo at a press conference in Seattle. In addition to the clock and microwave, there were new smart speakers Echo, a device that places Alexa in cars and a dedicated digital recorder to compete with the most popular gadget of 2007, the TiVo.

"There is absolutely no revenue or gross margins generated by these devices," said Werner Goertz, an analyst at Gartner. "It's an investment in Alexa's proliferation. Proliferation creates an infrastructure."

Amazon wants to attract users to its ecosystem, says Goertz. The real money will come when Alexa users buy products on Amazon.com, consume Amazon Prime content and use Amazon Web Services.

Data is at the heart of this plan for the dominance of the voice. The key players all have their own strengths in data collection, said Forrester analyst Julie Ask.

Google has information from your emails, your calendar and your locations, while Apple knows everything you do with your smartphone. Amazon mainly knows what you buy and watch, but Alexa changes that.

Imagine having regular conversations with your microwave oven. The information on what you eat and when could be worth more for Amazon than what you paid for the device.

"For one of these virtual assistants to work properly, it must have a lot of contextual data on a consumer," said Ask. "Integrating Alexa would give Amazon a bigger footprint."

Amazon clearly has ambitions for Alexa outside the house. Thursday's smallest but most intriguing product was Echo Auto, which introduces Alexa pickups and controls into the car. Like most first-generation Echo devices, the Auto presents an uninspired design – a black rectangle with buttons and an unsightly wire connecting it to a power source. But this creates a new category of products.

Apple's Siri and Google's assistant are already in vehicles, but they have arrived through smartphones and embedded infotainment systems. Perhaps because the fire phone is still down in 2014, Amazon is trying to make Alexa mobile with gadgets like Echo Auto instead.

Although Amazon can bypass the phone to hear commands anywhere, it's not clear that the future boils down to one dominant voice assistant.

"The jury still does not know if we want one agent to go from one screen to the other," said Justine Cassell, a professor at the Institute for Human Interaction. -Machine Carnegie Mellon. "Would we be different brand agents in each of our devices with different skill sets? For Amazon, it's advantageous that this character moves from one screen to the other."

Which wizard ends up being everywhere may not have as much impact on our lives as the way Alexa, Siri or Janet actually work.

"It's curious for me to know they're always going to have the answer, which is not the way we learn anything," Cassell said. "Or if eventually they will really become useful tools for our development as people."

CNNMoney (San Francisco) First published on September 22, 2018: 10:14 ET