Amazon's digital assistant Alexa is now on iOS

With Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri, iOS users will now get to choose among four virtual assistant options.

alexa
Amazon

Siri, is ready to face some tough competition in the coming weeks. Previously, it was reported that Cortana, which is Microsoft's virtual assistant, has been given a facelift to make it more appealing to iOS users and also give them an added option to opt for along with Google Assistant, which has already been around for some time on the iOS platform with Google Allo. Now, Alexa which is the digital assistant of Amazon is making its debut in iOS also, which means users will now get to choose among these four options and see what works out best for them.

If you open the Amazon app on your iOS device you will now come across a microphone icon at the very top of the screen which would launch Alexa for you. Alexa is a quite capable digital assistant and now it can help you with your purchases, take your pick from the music list, pull up titles from the well-stocked Kindle library, find out something in the news or how the traffic is going to be etc.

Alexa can pitch in to help along with answering questions about historical or general knowledge, it can also be used to spell out words and also define what it means, make complete conversions and straightforward calculations.

The only downside with using Alexa on the iOS platform would be the fact that every time you will need it, you will have to go to the Amazon app and then bring it up for use. Siri, on the other hand, is something that was built exclusively keeping an iOS user in mind and is, therefore, more adept in making a complete set of tasks in comparison.

However, it is always nice to have options in hand and hopefully, in the near future we may get to see these existing alternative digital assistants become more in tune with the iOS platform or some new app that has made it possible.

This article was first published on March 17, 2017
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