At CES 2018, one of the big trends for PC makers is to bring Alexa to Windows 10. While fans of Cortana may not be too happy about this, having a choice is always a good thing.

I got to spend a little bit of time playing with Alexa on HP’s Wave PC and it works quite well. If you are familiar with Alexa on your smartphone, the assistant works exactly the same on the PC.

The computer I tested this on has microphones and an indicator light built in so that you do not need to manually launch Alexa for it to work. While you can hit cntrl+shift+a to launch the assistant, simply saying “Alexa” worked every time, even in the noisy conference room.

If you are looking for Alexa to control your PC, that doesn’t appear to be possible yet as it only operates within its current ecosystem. What this means is that searching your PC is still done with Cortana which puts you in an awkward situation of using two different assistants on the same piece of hardware.

For now, it looks like Alexa is locked to the new machines but seeing as it is only software, I don’t think it will take too long for it to show up in other places. Once we are able to get our hands on Alexa outside the CES show floor, we will do a deeper dive into the app and its functionality.

Tagged with Alexa, Windows 10