Hey devs. Forget Siri – Amazon's Alexa will show you a $100m good time

Amazon is reaching out to developers in an effort to build a rival to voice assistant services like Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana. The online retail giant has released APIs and a software development kit (SDK) in an effort to build up its new Alexa voice service, which is built into its Echo smart speaker. It has also …

[davtom]

"Amazon isn't clear on how Alexa would figure out which service to use if, say, there are six different weather apps, or ten different booksellers."

If a book was requested, I'm guessing that Alexa would choose the Amazon bookseller.

I just have this feeling for no explainable reason...

[Tromos]

"Buy six tickets for the next showing of Jurassic World."

Done. You have row 7 seats 14 to 19 at screen 2, the Roxy, Kuala Lumpur. You have two minutes before it starts.

[Lysenko]

Could be creepy in your house...

...but I can see uses for it in other settings, like conference rooms. So long as everything in the room is intended to be recorded\minuted (sales presentation or something) there could be some "shiny beads" coolness factor in controlling the lighting, projector, ordering taxis or whatever.

[Ian Rogers]

wtf?

Elsewhere in this excellent journal we've had articles wondering why women find IT an uncomfortable profession, then we have this headline "Alexa show you a good time" and a fantasy image getting her kit off...

Even as an egalitarian I normally let this sort of thing slide, but this one seems crass even for a Friday.