Amazon isn’t at CES in any formal capacity, but once again, it seems to be everywhere thanks to Alexa. Since opening up its voice assistant to other companies’ products, we’ve seen it put in all types of gadgets and gain some strange integrations. And at CES this week, the continuation of that is one of the biggest trends we’ve seen.
Here are the highlights:
Alexa built in
These products include a microphone and speakers, so you can talk directly to them to interact with Alexa — no Echo required.
- Westinghouse, Element, and Seiki are all building TVs that include Fire TV software and a remote that includes Alexa voice control.
- LG put Alexa in a refrigerator, which also has a giant 29-inch touchscreen.
- LG also put Alexa into Hub, its smart home robot.
- Lenovo’s Smart Assistant is basically an Echo by a different name.
- Mattel’s Aristotle is sort of like an Echo, but with features designed to help parents care for newborns.
- Bixi is making a portable puck with Alexa in it.
- GE is presenting its LED ring lamp, which is kind of like what would happen if you put a halo on an Echo Dot.
- Omaker made a portable speaker with Alexa.
- Onvocal made these horrible business neckbuds with Alexa.
- This five-device charging dock includes a speaker with Alexa support.
- A dancing robot.
- A prototype alarm clock.
- A “bedside clock speaker,” which I think is sort of like an alarm clock.
- LG made a wide-eyed robot that uses Alexa.
- Ford is putting Alexa in Fusions and F-150s. Yes, cars!
- Volkswagen plans to do the same (with its own cars, not the F-150).
- Inrix is integrating Alexa with its OpenCar platform. More cars!
- Huawei is including an Alexa app by default on its new Mate 9 smartphone.
- Martian put Alexa in its mVoice smartwatch (poor implementation though).
- Alexa is also inside this creepy eyeball camera.
Alexa integrations
Even more products are adding integrations with Alexa, meaning they can be controlled by voice commands given to an Echo, Echo Dot, or any of the Alexa-enabled devices listed above.
- Whirlpool made new washers, dryers, refrigerators, and ovens that can be controlled, to varying degrees, with Alexa.
- Dish’s Hopper DVR is gaining voice control through Alexa.
- Samsung’s Roomba competitor now lets you be even lazier about vacuuming by just yelling at an Echo device.
- ADT is adding Alexa control to its Pulse security system.
- Linksys’ Velop router system will support a handful of commands, including one to that lets Alexa read your Wi-Fi password aloud.
- Some of Coway's air purifiers can now be controlled by Alexa.
- iDevices’ new stick-on light switch for HomeKit... also works with Alexa.
- Same with Incipio’s new HomeKit products.
- Array is making a connected lock with Alexa support.
That’s (most of) what we’ve spotted so far, but there’s likely to be more out there already and more to come. GeekWire reports that Alexa is now past 7,000 “skills” — Amazon’s name for integrations — more than doubling its total from September. In June, it had only 1,000 integrations.
Clearly, companies are interested. The question now may be: with such a wide variety of integrations and varying product qualities, can Amazon keep it all together in a way consumers continue to respect?
This story, initially published January 4th, has been updated with additional Alexa integrations.