Why Amazon is the current king of the virtual assistants

Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant was impossible to miss at CES 2017. The surprise hit service that powers Amazon's smart home hub, Echo, is being embedded into a growing arsenal of connected products, inside and outside the home. In many ways, Alexa is the feature of the moment for consumer electronics such as refrigerators, vacuums, DVR boxes, robots, TVs, washers and dryers, cars, and an important product category in which Amazon has thus far failed spectacularly: smartphones. Amazon was