The Secret Origins of Amazon's Alexa: From Whiteboard Sketch to Voice Assistant

In 2011, Jeff Bezos sketched a $20 voice-controlled device on a whiteboard, challenging Greg Hart to lead its development. Despite having no hardware experience, Hart assembled a secretive team to tackle the complex challenge of far-field speech recognition. Racing against Apple's Siri, the team invested hundreds of millions and acquired startups like Ivona to build a standalone assistant that could understand commands from across a noisy room.