Amazon Alexa for PC

Amazon Alexa (also known as Alexa for Windows PC) is an industry-leading virtual assistant AI that can interact with PC users using natural voice detection and perform streamlined two-way conversations. Its core capability includes an incredible variety of tasks such as multimedia playback, alarm management, performing an online search, creating to-do lists and notes, reporting weather, traffic, sport, news, and other real-time information, and much more.

Originally released in 2014 as part of the Amazon Echo smart speakers deployment to the market, this service has over the following years grown to an incredible size, reaching almost every smart platform such as TVs, smart boxes, phones, tablets, smart home devices, cars, and of course the home desktop and laptop PCs. This entire cloud-powered voice detection and reproduction system was inspired by the artificial computer voice and conversational system depicted in the science fiction TV and film franchise Star Trek.

The only hardware requirement that Amazon Alexa has is the presence of a microphone, speaker, and internet connection. The app is very light since almost all of its processing is happening on the large cloud infrastructure owned by Amazon. The app functions by constantly monitoring for users to say “Hey Alexa”, and then recording, compressing, securing, and sending that vocal query over the internet to be analyzed and transformed into a text, processed, and return an answer that Alexa can say or perform on its local speaker. Since the entire service is managed by Amazon, the exact client device in your home can be any device that is compatible with Alexa. This means users can start interacting with their PC version of the app and seamlessly move to their smart speakers, TV, or mobile phone, never losing contact with this smart voice assistant.

While many users have found that the easiest way to interact with Alexa is with the use of the Amazon Echo smart speaker, the version of Amazon Alexa on Windows PC is as good as any other. As of 2019, the app can perform over 90 thousand functions (also called “skills”), that cover the fields of home automation, music streaming, retrieving sports stats and live updates, managing messages and calls, traffic updates, weather reports, and much more. Its usefulness can even be expanded by users with the help of Alexa home Skill APIs and Blueprint service for creating new templates.