Amazon’s Prime service has quite a few perks, not the least of which is free two-day shipping for nearly anything you buy on the mammoth-sized merchant website. Of course, Prime also offers members the ability to access a large collection of free streaming movies and TV shows, and now it looks like Prime members will also get the ability to shop for just about anything on Amazon with Alexa, as Amazon has just debuted a new feature for the software that enables online shopping by voice. Despite the potential popular opinion, the Echo shouldn’t be the only device that will be able to take advantage of this as Alexa powers more than just the smart speaker, it is, however, quite likely to be the most used device for this purpose.
Essentially, being able to order “tens of millions” of items on Amazon through Alexa gives the Echo one more trick up its sleeves than it already had. Without this newly announced feature, the Echo was already capable of a wide range of different functions that included ordering pizza from Domino’s, requesting a ride from Uber, reading out the weather as well as Kindle books, and much more, and even though this isn’t an Echo-specific feature, being able to order products off the Amazon site does add to the Echo’s allure especially if you shop primarily on Amazon when you shop online.
With this new Alexa feature out in the open, it is worth mentioning that it is different from ‘Amazon Choice,’ a voice-enabled function that Amazon began offering to consumers with an Alexa-powered device in May that would either send out recommendations of a product when a person ordered from a category they hadn’t ordered from before, or send out a specific item if the person had ordered it in the past, say, for example, Bounty paper towels. With this new feature however, users can simply ask Alexa to order pretty much anything, from paper towels to trash bags, and whether or not it’s been ordered through Amazon in the past makes no difference, as customers will get exactly what they ask for. For those who aren’t already Prime members, this might just be the ticket to get them interested.