She's the voice on 100 million Amazon Echo speakers, but have you ever wondered what Amazon's smart assistant, Alexa , would look like in real life?
Well you could soon find out, after Rohit Prasad, head scientist of the Alexa artificial-intelligence group at Amazon, hinted that Alexa could soon get her own robot body.
Speaking at EmTech Digital, MIT Technology Review's AI conference, Prasad said that Alexa has many advantages over a human brain, like access to a vast encyclopedia of useful facts.
However, her limited experience of the world mean she lacks common sense, and the ability to put some queries in context.
"The only way to make smart assistants really smart is to give it eyes and let it explore the world," Prasad said.
This could mean that Alexa will one day live inside something resembling a robot with eyes, limbs, and a way of moving around.
Amazon has already created a version of its Echo device with a camera , and is rumoured to be working on a home robot that could offer companionship or perform basic chores around the house.
Other companies are developing personal robots capable of responding to spoken queries.
Prasad didn't offer any more specifics, but implied that bringing together speech, vision and physical manipulation could create smarter, more helpful AI programs with much better language skills.
In January 2017, an inventor called Steve shared a video of a robotic face he had made for his Amazon Alexa voice-controlled speaker.
The creepy robot, nicknamed Elvia, had moving lips, short hair and a cap, and eyes that flicked around, as though she was looking right at you.
Let's hope the official Alexa robot looks nothing like that.
