It Might Get Loud

- Brian Dumaine

FOUR SHORT YEARS AGO, Amazon was merely a ferociously successful online retailer and the dominant provider of online web hosting for companies. It also sold its own line of consumer electronics devices, including the Kindle e-reader, a bold but understandably complimentary outgrowth of its pioneering role as a next-generation bookseller. Today, thanks to the ubiquitous Amazon Echo smart speaker and its Alexa voice-recognition engine, Amazon has sparked nothing less than the biggest shift in personal computing and communications since Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone.

It all seemed like such a novelty at first. In November 2014, Amazon debuted the Echo, a high-tech genie that uses artificial intelligence to listen to human queries, scan millions of words in an Internet-connected database, and provide answers from the profound to the mundane. Now, sales of some 47 million Echo devices later, Amazon responds to consumers in 80 countries, from Albania to Zambia, fielding an average of 130 million questions each day. Alexa, named for the ancient Egyptian library in Alexandria, can take musical requests, supply weather reports and sports scores, and remotely adjust a user’s thermostat. It can tell jokes; respond to trivia questions; and perform prosaic, even sophomoric, tricks. (Ask Alexa for a fart, if you must.)