SEATTLE — Amazon surprised a lot of people when its Echo, a $180 so-called smart speaker, became a hit, giving them a novel way to play music, turn on the lights in their homes and set thermostats with voice commands.
Amazon, though, has much bigger plans for the technology behind Echo. It wants the Alexa Voice Service, which powers Echo, to be an ingredient in devices around the home and beyond, even if they aren’t made by Amazon.
The vision of an omnipresent intelligent assistant is one Amazon shares, in one form or another, with most other big technology companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft. Along with a handful of start-ups, these companies see their intelligent assistants as powerful new ways for users to interact with devices and internet services — just as smartphone touch screens were.
Many technology specialists think that people will be O.K. with a single intelligent assistant in their lives but that most won’t have the patience to regularly use two or three of them, each with its individual quirks. As a result, each company is racing to weave its assistant into as many devices and services as possible.
Nucleus, the Anywhere Intercom
Video by Nucleus
Amazon, for example, wants Alexa to be a part of products like Nucleus, a smart-intercom system with a touch screen and a camera that went on sale last week for $249 (or $199 each if you buy two or three at once). Nucleus owners can have Alexa play music and read a weather forecast through the device. In a phone interview, Jonathan Frankel, the chief executive of Nucleus, said that adding Alexa to Nucleus was a no-brainer because it made the device far more useful.
“We’re taking $180 worth of utility and adding it into a $200 device,” he said.
So far, a handful of smaller companies have released or promised to release products with Alexa built into them. There’s Triby, a portable speaker; CoWatch, a smartwatch; and Pebble Core, a wireless wearable device by the maker of the Pebble smartwatch.
Ford Motor is working with Amazon to integrate Alexa into its vehicles so drivers can control smart-home features like lights, thermostats and security systems from their cars.
Over 10,000 developers have registered to integrate Alexa into their products, Amazon said. It won’t say how many Echo units it has sold, except to say that millions of devices with Alexa in them have been purchased.
John MacFarlane, the chief executive of Sonos, another well-known device maker, hinted in a blog post this year that Sonos was working on a way to play music through its speakers using Alexa voice control.
In an interview this spring, David Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices, said that the company wanted there to be as many Alexa-linked “endpoints” around the home as possible and that Amazon did not really care who made those devices. Amazon has expanded its lineup of devices that use Alexa with its Echo Dot, a miniature version of the Echo speaker, and Amazon Tap, a portable Bluetooth speaker.
“The longer-term vision is a little bit like the ‘Star Trek’ computer,” Mr. Limp said. “Captain Kirk or Picard could sit on the bridge and ask anything and get the right answer.”
But while Amazon has made a lot of progress in this regard, it may have a hard time extending Alexa’s reach outside the home because of its weaknesses in mobile technology, analysts say.
The success of Echo has been described as a redemption of sorts for Amazon after it suffered a brutal defeat in the smartphone market with its Fire Phone, which the company stopped selling after poor sales — a misstep that has left Amazon vulnerable.
Apple and Google have clear advantages over Amazon because of their dominant positions in the mobile market. And they are pushing their versions of Alexa — Siri and Google’s assistant — as ways to control other devices throughout the home.
Apple has a technology called HomeKit that allows people to control thermostats, light switches and other devices with Siri from Apple devices. Google has announced plans for an Echo-like home speaker called Google Home.
As intelligent assistants improve in quality, Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research, thinks people will want these virtual helpers to follow them all day like a companion. “What you want from an assistant is that they are always available to you everywhere,” he said.
While Amazon could eventually give people access to Alexa’s functions through apps on smartphones (a couple of apps from independent developers do this already), Mr. Dawson is skeptical that Amazon will be able to make them work as well as assistants more deeply integrated into smartphones by Apple and Google.
“They’re basically absent on smartphones, which are devices we take everywhere we go,” he said.