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"Alexa" is Amazon's cloud-connected, voice-activated virtual assistant. She's Siri in a speaker. You wake her up by saying her name, or by saying one of your two other wake word options, "Amazon" or "Echo." The array of microphones inside of the Echo Dot is always listening, and when they hear the wake word, they'll record whatever you say next and send it off through the cloud to Amazon's servers. Those servers will figure out what you're asking for, then tell Alexa how to respond. All of this happens in about a second.
You can ask Alexa to do all sorts of things. For starters, she can stream music from Amazon Prime Music, Pandora, or Spotify. She can can play podcasts from iHeartRadio or TuneIn. She can set kitchen timers. She can look up facts. She can wake you up in the morning. She can tell your kids painfully bad jokes. She can read off the day's headlines from whatever news sources you like (including, ahem, CNET). All you have to do is ask.
On top of that, Alexa keeps getting smarter thanks to an increasingly robust market of third-party voice apps called "skills." There are over 3,000 of them at this point, and each one teaches Alexa a new trick. The Uber and Lyft skills let you tell Alexa to call you a ride. The Capital One skill lets you tell Alexa to make a credit card payment. The Domino's skill lets you tell Alexa to order a pizza. A skill called The Wayne Investigation lets you talk your way through an interactive mystery set in Gotham City. You can browse through them all in the Alexa app, then pick which ones you want to enable. You can also just ask Alexa to turn one on by saying something like, "Alexa, enable the Jeopardy skill." And, as of now, none of them cost anything.
