Jeff Bezos wanted a voice computer. Not as a product pivot, but as a founding obsession he stated publicly from Amazon's earliest days. The result was two products: the Echo speaker and the Alexa voice assistant, both of which put a new computing paradigm into tens of millions of homes.
The Version History podcast episode covering Echo's development is worth your time because it lives in the process, not the outcome. The team building Alexa hit a sustained series of hard technical problems before shipping anything. That gap between Bezos's vision and the engineering reality is where the interesting story is.
If you think you know the Echo origin story, you probably know the press release version. This episode goes inside the development cycle. Listen to the full episode at pod.link/1840983742.
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