Amazon's virtual aide Alexa shouts above rivals

Virtual assistants are everywhere at CES this year - but one speaks louder than the rest.

Amazon's Alexa has popped up in a bewildering list of devices including fridges, cars and robots, BBC News reports.

Manufacturers are said to be clearly interested in making their appliances voice-operable, and many see Alexa as a great way to do this.

But having Alexa also allows the appliances to gain capabilities, such as streaming music and turning smart lights on and off.

"Alexa's rivals haven't been promoted quite as well," tech analyst Dinesh Kithany at IHS Technology told the BBC, though he noted companies adopting the assistant must think of genuinely useful ways to integrate it into their products.

Manufacturers are able to design new "skills" for the assistant - meaning the AI is not limited to what Amazon has built in.

Alexa can, with a quick bit of programming, be adapted to lock car doors or tell you when your washing machine's cycle will finish.

Perhaps this is how Amazon has cornered so much of the market - by explicitly designing a flexible AI that allows companies to implement it as they see fit.

Over the last seven years, the world has witnessed the rapid proliferation of Google's Android operating system - now in more smartphones than any other OS by far, as well as many TVs, watches and computers.

Part of this meteoric rise is down to the fact that Google gives Android away for free to device manufacturers - just like Amazon is doing with Alexa.

Despite the search giant having a long history of voice recognition research, it has only just started promoting its own Google Assistant to third parties. That gives Amazon first-mover advantage.

While a glance around CES's show floors suggests Alexa is poised to dominate, it's worth remembering that this is a US trade show.

Amazon is not quite as global a company as Google or Microsoft - the online retailer doesn't have a website for countries in Scandinavia, the Middle East or Africa, for example.

And not all implementations of Alexa make the assistant easy to access, notes Lauren Goode at news site The Verge.

She tested headphones by OnVocal that make the aide accessible - via a tiny button that needs to be pressed to activate it.

"You'd kind of think that walking around while wearing these is just as good as having an Echo strapped to your body. It's not," she wrote.

She's the star of CES even though her creator isn't exhibiting on the show floor. Amazon's Alexa was the first voice assistant to turn up in a compelling consumer product, the Echo speaker, rather than just on a smartphone.

Although Google Home has now joined the fray it's clear who's in the lead. Across CES, you can hear Amazon's creation at work.

Who'd have thought a few years back that an online retailer with a patchy record when it comes to hardware devices would be the single most influential player at a consumer electronics event?

In the past, it has been Apple and Google who've been able to dominate CES without even turning up - now Amazon is looking like the tech industry's thought leader.