When Amazon launched Alexa, its intelligent voice assistant, it did so on the back of an embarrassing failure. The company’s attempt to make a success of a smartphone called the Fire had flopped, forcing a $170m writedown in late 2014. Analysts called it one of the worst phones ever made.
The end of the Fire phone seemed to dash Amazon’s hopes of developing its own mobile platform. At a time when Apple had the iPhone, and Alphabet had its ubiquitous Google search engine, Amazon was desperate to find ways to reach customers directly without going through a rival tech company.
Although few expected it at the time, Alexa has given Amazon precisely the entrée it had been seeking with the Fire phone — just in a different format. Instead of asking users to interact with a screen, Alexa is entirely voice based.