Amazon's race to make Alexa smarter

But the product is still a shadow of what the man in charge - Dave Limp - and indeed their owners, hope it will become. "We have thousands of engineers inside Amazon adding to [its] capability every day and then another tens of thousands of developers adding to the skills," he tells the BBC. "The thing I am sure of is that this time next year she will be significantly more intelligent than she is now, and that sometime in the future we will hit our goal of reinventing the Star Trek computer." It's a lofty goal, especially since any attempt to go beyond commanding a weather update or asking for the lights to be switched on is currently asking for trouble.