The Secret Origins of Amazon’s Alexa
Jeff Bezos first sketched out the device that would become the Amazon Echo on a conference room whiteboard in early 2011. He wanted it to cost $20 and be controlled entirely by voice. Its brains would live in the cloud, exploiting the company’s Web Services offerings and allowing Amazon to constantly improve it without requiring owners to upgrade their hardware.
The first-ever depiction of a device with Alexa—the artificially intelligent virtual assistant that Bezos would name after the ancient library of Alexandria—showed the speaker, a microphone, and a mute button. It wouldn’t be able to understand commands right out of the box, so the sketch identified the act of configuring the device to a wireless network as a challenge requiring further thought.
Greg Hart, who was Bezos’ technical adviser, or “TA,” at the time, was the other person in the meeting, and he was listening closely. Bezos said he wanted Hart to lead the group that would turn this somewhat outlandish notion for a voice computer into an actual product. Hart snapped a photo of the drawing with his phone.
