Newish Dog, Old Trick: Alexa Can Now Send A Text

As it turns out, you can teach a dog new tricks. Especially if the “dog” in question is actually a sophisticated piece of artificial intelligence designed to learn new tricks.

Amazon’s personal assistant AI Alexa also knew a fair number of tricks already – she can buy stuff, tell you a joke (not a very good joke), find your phone or turn on your lights (provided you have the right hardware).

And now her bag of tricks has gotten even deeper – with a new fancy skill set that includes sending text messages. For now, it’s only available for AT&T subscribers and will only provide the capabilities for up to 10 contacts using the AI voice system.

Voice texting is not a totally new development – most smartphones have some version of voice-to-text, though as the recipient of any garbled text message will affirm, the results are often mixed. Alexa users will first ask her to text a certain person in their contact list, and she’ll respond by asking what you want the message to say.

“Amazon Echo is ahead of the curve in terms of voice recognition technology and functionality,” Jeff Bradley, AT&T’s senior vice president for device and network services marketing, said in a statement.

As part of the deal, AT&T is selling the Alexa-enabled Echo and Echo Dot through its website and promoting more visibility for its voice-activated devices.

It is unknown at this time if Alexa is able to – or will be able to – read back messages in the future.  Amazon has previously  stated that its long terms goal is for Alexa to be able to have coherent conversations with people.