Short answers, pulled from the story.
Amazon acquired the British company Evi, founded in 2005 by William Tunstall-Pedoe, in 2012, and the Polish speech synthesizer Ivona in 2013. Evi provided Alexa's question-to-answer system and Ivona provided its text-to-speech model.
Amazon chose the name Alexa partly because its hard consonant X helps the wake word register with higher recognition precision. The name is also reminiscent of the Library of Alexandria, the same reasoning behind the separate Amazon Alexa Internet service.
Amazon announced Alexa on the 6th of November 2014 alongside the Amazon Echo smart speaker. Amazon Lab126 also developed the Echo Dot, Echo Studio, and Amazon Tap as early Alexa devices.
By January 2019, Amazon said it had sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices, with more than 10,000 employees working on Alexa and related products. Third-party developers had built more than 90,000 Alexa skills, up from just 1,000 in June 2016.
Alexa+ is the generative-AI version of Amazon Alexa that launched in February 2025, built on Amazon's Nova models and free for Prime members. On the same day Alexa+ was announced, Anthropic said its Claude models were also used within Alexa+.
In November 2018, Amazon mistakenly sent 1,700 recordings of an American couple to an unrelated man in Europe. In May 2018, an Echo in Portland, Oregon sent a family's private conversation to one of their contacts without permission, and a New Hampshire judge later allowed Echo recordings to be used as evidence in the murder case against Timothy Verrill.