wants the Echo to be your personal robot butler

               

Amazon's fuller ambitions for the Echo and its Alexa cloud-based voice software have become a little clearer. The company announced Thursday that it is opening up the system to developers, so that anyone can design their own programs to work with the sleek cylindrical in-home assistant
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The company announced that its new developer's kit will make it easy for programmers to work with the device, even without previous knowledge of how to work with voice-recognition systems.

"No experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding is required—Amazon does all the work to hear, understand, and process the customer’s spoken request so a developer doesn’t have to,"

 the company said in a press release. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos is the owner of The Washington Post.) That means amateur and professional developers alike can make programs for themselves.

That means they could make custom commands for smart appliances such as thermostats and sprinklers, or custom programs that work with Web sites so you can get news updates fed to your Echo.