How the Amazon Echo learned to talk — and listen
Apr 05, 2026
A photo of a black speaker, the Amazon Echo, on a gray background. | Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Jeff Bezos badly wanted a voice computer. He had been saying so publicly since the very early days of Amazon, telling anyone who would listen about why voice might make it easier an
d more natural to interact with technology. (And to buy stuff from Jeff Bezos.) But when a team at Amazon set out to actually make the voice computer a reality, they encountered a seemingly endless series of hard problems. Eventually, though, they created two products, the Echo speaker and the Alexa voice assistant, that would help bring a new kind of computer to millions of people.
On this episode of Version History, we tell the story of the Echo's development i …
Read the full story at The Verge.
...read more
read less