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December 14, 2017

A shout out to Alexa for holiday shopping assist

By JOSEPH PISANI
AP Retail Writer

NEW YORK — It was a few weeks before Christmas and time to put my voice assistant to the test: Could I just shout out the gifts I needed to buy without having to get on a smartphone or computer?

Alexa, the virtual assistant inside my Echo Dot, is really good at reordering stuff I already bought on Amazon. But asking it to order new items was trickier: I had to be precise and know exactly what I wanted to buy. There were times I had to rephrase orders until it could understand me. And other times I just gave up and went to my phone to make an order.


 
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