Amazon Echo and Alexa are about to get much better

As someone who was one of the chosen to buy the Amazon Echo early (now available to all), I have had extensive time playing with the technological oddity. While it is a welcome addition to my home -- my family uses it for weather, traffic, spelling and math -- I have been a bit underwhelmed by the overall usefulness.

I've been hesitant to truly embrace Amazon's assistant, as I wasn't sure it had a future. The reason? The lack of a clear plan or path for developers made me wonder if it could truly compete with more open and focused technologies. Today, my hesitation is quelled, as Amazon lays out an impressive plan for developers. This is much bigger than Echo, however.

"With a few lines of code, developers can easily integrate existing web services with Alexa or, in just a few hours, they can build entirely new experiences designed around voice. No experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding is required -- Amazon does all the work to hear, understand, and process the customer's spoken request so a developer doesn't have to", says Amazon of the new Alexa Skills Kit.

The company further explains, "the Alexa Fund -- named for Alexa, the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo -- is open to anyone with an innovative idea for how voice technology can improve customers' lives. Alexa Fund investment decisions will be made based on the potential for unique or novel applications of voice technology that leverage the Alexa Skills Kit or the Alexa Voice Service".

Alexa Voice Search is the dark horse here. The Alexa Skills Kit will help developers tap into Echo, while the Alexa Fund should motivate those developers by way of funding -- $100 million is a great motivator!

Alexa Voice Search, however, aims to take Alexa out of Echo altogether. You see, Amazon would like hardware makers to utilize Alexa. In other words, "she" is being freed from her Echo-only home, and being allowed to service other devices too.

Amazon's plans for Alexa Voice Search are very lofty, including not only home users, but businesses and the Internet of Things too. The company gives an example of movie theaters integrating Alexa into ticket machines for voice-buying entrance into the cinema, or turning on the lawn sprinklers. Exciting stuff.

Surely Amazon will charge these hardware makers for Alexa technology, right? Nope. Totally free. Whoa.

Are you excited about the potential of Echo and Alexa? Tell me in the comments.