With Cortana's Invoke speaker finally on the way, Amazon is dangerously close to lapping the field

[Windows Central]

Alexa has gained the ability to make voice calls, and its 'Echo Show' will bolster the living room. So will there be any room left for a smart speaker from Microsoft? Maybe. In the meantime, we look at Amazon's latest.
It was about three or four years ago when my wife and I decided to finally get rid of our landline. We weren't really using it anymore —*it was mostly an emergency backup, and a great way for solicitors to bug us. (That it occasionally made phantom 911 calls in the middle of the night was another impetus.)

This presented a problem, though. Our kids ride the bus home, and family members pick them up there. But what happens if for some reason nobody shows? The kids need a way to call their parents.
I had a brief flirtation with Google Hangouts for this. But it was clunky at best, and now is a nonstarter, since Hangouts is dying. And so this is how our eldest daughter got "her" first phone way earlier than I would have liked.
This is also why I'm ridiculously excited about Amazon's recent announcements. Which naturally, have implications for Microsoft's Skype platform, and any efforts to bring Cortana to the living room.

Full story from the WindowsCentral blog...

 

[Drael646464]

lol, that's just what we need ANOTHER chat app, with less users, being essentially used in the article for what a windows 10 mobile device has been able to do for years - make a call via a voice command.

I mean good for them for trying and all, but probably they should try and make their AI smarter.

I wonder where amazon's tech ventures will be in ten years time?

I guess they are sort of interesting in a way, but without an OS or a software ecosystem beyond the beyond terrible amazon app store, and the limited skills keyphrases offered so far, its hard to imagine them being a serious competitor to apple, google or msft.

The play of being a mainly budget player in an extremely early market, is even more confusing. Be smarter to bring more features like wireless inter-room speaker connectivity, high fidelity sound, motion detection and so on, accessories, and charge a premium, and clean up, like apple did back in the hay day of phones.

I'd like to be surprised though. I'm always keen to see some extra players on the feild