• The Street, Monday, March 6, 2017 9:45 AM

As much as Amazon's  Echo home speaker/voice assistant has turned into a surprise hit and yielded a blizzard of positive media attention, the Alexa voice assistant powering Echo hardware is still in key respects at a strategic disadvantage relative to Alphabet/Google, Apple, and Microsoft's  rival offerings. Google and Apple's assistants each shipped with hundreds of millions of mobile devices last year, and Microsoft's perhaps on close to 200 million PCs. By contrast, Echo sales (judging by estimates) were likely only in seven figures. In theory, that would leave Google/Apple much better-positioned to create powerful third-party ecosystems for their assistants, as well as to optimize them in response to user voice commands. In practice, Amazon's all-out push to both improve Alexa and place it within as many devices as possible is making for a very interesting battle.

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