AMZN Amazon.com Inc

By Nathan Olivarez-Giles 

Amazon.com Inc.'s Alexa is finally stepping up to challenge Apple Inc.'s Siri on its home turf: mobile devices. This week, Amazon is rolling out an update for all of its most recent Fire tablets that features the company's voice assistant built directly into the operating system.

For anyone who's used Alexa on Echo speakers or Fire TV streaming devices, the experience of using Alexa on a tablet running Amazon's Fire OS is pretty much the same. With a long-press of a Fire tablet's home button, Alexa can respond to most, if not all, the commands it gets on an Echo speaker. It can add items to your Amazon shopping list and shopping cart, and even reorder items you've bought in the past. It can play music and control smart-home devices like Philips Hue lightbulbs and Nest thermostats.

But the key to Alexa's presence on tablets is the screen. When you ask Alexa for weather forecasts, daily news, sports scores, cooking recipes, trivia and math problems, answers are spoken aloud and displayed on cards with more detailed information.

If you ask Alexa to "play my Johnny Cash station on Pandora," you'll see album art and get Pandora controls such as thumbs-up and skip ahead. You have to have Pandora logged in on your Alexa app, but the cool thing is, you don't have to install a Pandora app on your Fire tablet for this to work. Weirdly, though, Fire tablets don't yet support Spotify control via Alexa. (Amazon says it's working on it, but wouldn't say when it might arrive.)

You can use Alexa to hail a ride in Uber or Lyft on a Fire tablet, but you can't cancel the ride unless you open the Uber or Lyft apps. Also, there's no map showing how close your driver is.

The one thing that Alexa can do on tablets that it can't do on Echo is open apps -- "Open the Twitter app" or "Open Jetpack Joyride," for instance. Meanwhile, competitors such as Siri have gained the ability to perform specific functions in an app, like "Send Rene $20 in Square Cash." Alexa can't yet do that, though Amazon says it's on the road map.

The tablet's coolest trick is actually playing second fiddle: If you own an Echo, you can set up your tablet to show visuals for any request to your smart speaker. Weather, sports scores or other queries that might have a visual aid will all appear spontaneously on your nearby Fire tablet, if you've set it up in advance.

Alexa is impressive on Fire tablets, but it's still not as useful as Siri is on iPads. And since Amazon doesn't have any base in phones, Alexa's further expansion isn't clear. Voice assistants need to be integrated into a device -- if people have to launch an app, they'll never use one.

Just now, Google is pushing its own Assistant quite hard. It's in the Pixel smartphones and the coming Home speaker, and the company says Chromebooks and tablets are in the works, too.

Still, this move puts Alexa on many more devices: In addition to the new HD 8 tablet, it's showing up on all the Fire tablets released in the past year and a half, ranging from the $50 Fire to the $290 64GB Fire HD 10. (Alexa isn't coming to the older HDX tablets, however.)

Sure, Apple's Siri can still do more, but where will you find a $50 iPad?

Write to Nathan Olivarez-Giles at Nathan.Olivarez-giles@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 26, 2016 09:14 ET (13:14 GMT)

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