Forget ‘Googling It.’ Amazon Wants You to ‘Alexa It.’

With its aggressive new strategy of putting Alexa everywhere, Amazon aims to build an operating system for the physical world

Dave Limp, a senior vice president at Amazon, demonstrates a new Alexa feature. Photo: Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance/Getty

At its Seattle event last week, Amazon unveiled more than just an ambush of Echo devices. It also unveiled a new strategy.

While the company has been aggressively pushing Alexa into the homes of its customers for years in a bid to make it the smart assistant of choice, it now wants to put Alexa everywhere.

This is a departure from Amazon’s first Echo strategy, which was to make the devices so cheap that they were easy to buy, even if they weren’t all that appealing. Dave Limp, a senior vice president at Amazon, once told CNBC, “We try to price our products effectively at about what they cost to make.” For the past five years, Amazon has essentially given away Echo devices for free.

Now Amazon is flooding the market with such an array of Echo-enabled devices, across every possible category, that it will eventually be almost difficult to buy anything from Amazon without also acquiring some sort of Alexa capabilities.

The new products that Amazon unveiled at the Seattle event include:

• Echo Dot with Clock