Amazon's Alexa (housed within the Echo speaker product line) is yet to officially arrive in South Africa, but the company did share some good news for third party developers. Alexa, or rather the voice technology powering the digital assistant, is being opened up to developers to create their own offerings. 

Called Lex, the service will be available initially to assist current digital assistants and chatbots to sound friendlier and more human-like. As Lex resides within the cloud, as opposed to a specific piece of software or an app, it could potentially be fed data from various different assistants in order to refine the platform as a whole. 

In time then, Lex could be ported to other devices around the home, office or car, says the company's CTO Werner Vogels. While that's a few years off, this opening up of the platform is one of the first steps.