Amazon Echo gaining popularity in rave reviews
Amazon Echo, the $180 intuitive voice-controlled personal assistant for web-enabled smart homes, is being promoted as the next must-have consumer electronics device to succeed the smartphone. The Echo, which users address as “Alexa”, is reportedly rising in popularity, benefiting from a vast collection of top reviews and major investments to plug its potential in Super Bowl ads, two new portable versions and collaborations with Nest to ensure compatibility with other digital household devices. Experts suggest this is opening new realms of possibility for future computing innovations. Such developments are also setting Amazon on the path to usurping Apple’s Siri and Google’s Now in the electronic personal assistant space.

Many of the world’s largest technology companies have spent the last five years searching in vain for the holy grail, a machine to succeed the smartphone as the next must-have gadget.

They have made digital watches and fitness trackers, all manner of computerized glasses and goggles, and more doodads to plug into your TV than there are shows to watch on it.

Yet at the moment, the most promising candidate for the Next Great Gadget isn’t made by Apple, Google, Facebook or Microsoft. Instead, it is the Echo, a screenless, voice-controlled household computer built by Amazon — a company whose last big foray into consumer electronics, the Fire Phone, was a humiliating flop.

This time it may be different. A bit more than a year after its release, the Echo has morphed from a gimmicky experiment into a device that brims with profound possibility. The longer I use it, the more regularly it inspires the same sense of promise I felt when I used the first iPhone — a sense this machine is opening up a vast new realm in personal computing, and gently expanding the role that computers will play in our future.