When Amazon Echo with Alexa service came out in November 2014 I was skeptical. A speaker with voice recognition seemed like an unnecessary oddity.

Alexa’s SDK has been open to third party developers for a year now. As a software engineer it is important to keep up with emerging technologies and learn about them. I purchased an Amazon Echo about a month ago and had an opportunity to interact with the technology and try out the SDK. Subsequently, I discovered these important truths: