Alexa is the Future of Amazon's Consumer Activities – Quartz

Amazon launched more products this week than I've ever seen, announced immediately by a technology company. The pace was dizzying: at an event at Seattle headquarters, he announced a new product every five minutes or so for an hour and a half.

Almost all of these products were focused on Alexa, her virtual voice assistant. Before this week, you could reasonably describe Alexa as the brain of Amazon's Echo Smart Speakers. Now, it's the center of Amazon's game that is the owner of the smart home of the future.

Here is a quick overview of the products activated by Alexa that Amazon has announced: a wall clock, a microwave oven, a subwoofer, an Alexa for the car, a DVR for your TV antenna, a smart plug and a microphone which transforms your existing hi-fi installation into an audio platform powered by Alexa. Oh, and updates from Echo Dot, Echo Plus and Echo Show.

Beyond physical devices, Amazon has released new hardware and software so that developers can connect their own products to the software ecosystem. His new Alexa Gadgets Toolkit is a way for programmers to make their devices controllable by Alexa. Amazon has imagined gadgets such as physical timers that Alexa can set, robots that give Alexa fitness and reminders for automated pill boxes.

A mantra of Silicon Valley is "taking advantage of your data" and Amazon takes this to heart. The e-commerce company has data on billions of transactions, covering the space it wants to reduce. So far, it's mostly the AmazonBasics brand, which makes everything from backpacks to iPhone cables. But now, with Amazon's microwaves and AmazonBasics Smart Connectors enabled, all that electronics sells on Amazon begins to merge.

We have seen this tactic before. This has allowed other developers to sell their products without having to develop core technology, which has given Windows 88% of the global desktop and laptop market as well as global market share. 70% of Google's Android. Basically, when an operating system becomes popular, it eats the market.

But unlike Microsoft and Google, who developed the software and later rebounded with their own devices, Amazon literally created the Smart Voice Speaker category with its hardware and software.

Amazon will sell you gadgets for the smart home, encourage other developers to play with its ecosystem to get users, then use your own smart home to sell you things on Amazon. See: the AmazonBasics microwave oven, which is already equipped to automatically buy more popcorn when you're short.

The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, constantly talks about the devices. He mentioned Alexa devices in four of the company's last five quarterly earnings calls, although Alexa money is probably only a small part of the $ 52.8 billion in revenue in the last quarter. The mentions of "Alexa" in Amazon's latest call have even eclipsed the mentions of "Prime", a long time at the center of everything Amazon does.

And if all Amazon's hardware and software announced this week were not enough, there's another sign of the company's imminent dominance in the smart home: there will be a new Billy Bass Big Mouth with Alexa.