“The mass adoption” of Amazon’s Alexa devices “may lead to the decline of the keyboard,” said Ken Cassar, an analyst at Slice Intelligence, in a statement that’s part of a just-released report from the marketing research firm. Echo, which understands spoken questions and commands via its Alexa persona, saw its popularity skyrocket over the holiday season, according to Cassar. Amazon said at the end of December that Alexa Devices topped its best-seller list over the holiday season and that “millions” of Alexa Devices were sold worldwide, racking up sales that were “more than 9x over last year's holiday season.” Morgan Stanley believes that translates to about 9 million Alexa devices. Another hot spot for Alexa and similar devices is potentially the car, where the keyboard is also impractical, he says. Most preferred Alexa deviceThe inexpensive and smaller Echo Dot – priced at $49.99 – has been driving a lot of the sales, according to Slice.

Source: Fox News January 26, 2017 18:49 UTC