When it first launched in 2014, Amazon's Alexa voice assistant was little more than an experiment. It appeared first inside the Echo, itself a wacky gadget launched without warning or much expectation. As it took off, though, and millions of people began to put a smart speaker in their home, Amazon's ambition exploded. The company saw an opportunity to build a new voice-first computing platform that worked everywhere, all the time, no matter what you were doing. And it began to chase that vision at full speed.

While one team at Amazon works on the Echo products themselves—including the Echo Spot, Show, Dot, Plus, and probably a bunch more since you started reading this sentence—and another works on the Alexa service itself, a different team is working on engineering Alexa's world takeover. While Apple and Google offer access to their assistants slowly and methodically, Amazon has flung the doors off their hinges and let anyone in. The company knows the path to success is not just in Echo devices, and that Amazon can't possibly make every gadget anyone wants to use. So they've created a new division called Alexa Voice Services, which builds hardware and software with the aim of making it stupendously easy to add Alexa into whatever ceiling fan, lightbulb, refrigerator, or car someone might be working on. "You should be able to talk to Alexa no matter where you're located or what device you're talking to," says Priya Abani, Amazon's director of AVS enablement. "We basically envision a world where Alexa is everywhere."

The word "everywhere" has taken on a whole new meaning in the last few years. Thanks to decades of improvements in processor efficiency, bandwidth accessibility, and the incredible availability of cheap electronics, almost anything can be connected to the internet. Cars and trucks and bicycles, sure; all your home appliances, switches, bulbs, and fixtures; even your clothes, shoes, and jewelry. They're all coming online, and Amazon wants Alexa in all of them.

One of Amazon's Alexa development kits, which manufacturers can buy to construct their own voice-controlled products. Amazon

So far, Amazon says it has about 50 different third-party Alexa devices on the market, devices like the Ecobee Thermostat and Anker's Eufy Genie. The AVS team spent the last two years building the systems and tools to take that to a new level, with the hopes of having hundreds and thousands of Alexa devices on shelves sooner rather than later. The battle for voice-assistant supremacy rages on among the tech giants, the stakes higher than ever as companies attempt to be the one on the other side of the wake word. To win, Amazon's assembling an army.

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When Abani joined Amazon in 2016, she found herself having the same conversations over and over: everybody wanted to add voice to their product, but nobody knew how. "The first four months, all I was doing was sitting with our biz-dev team in god knows how many meetings," she says. These were thermostat companies, who knew temperature control but not voice recognition. They were lighting companies who knew how to optimize LEDs but not how to set up a mic array. Amazon had already been through all this in building the Echo, Abani says, "and I took on the job of understanding all the different components required to add voice to your product, then packaging them and disseminating them to the world." They built kits with all the parts you'd need to get started, packaged the right software with easy documentation, and even worked with chipmakers like Intel to build Alexa support right into the CPU.