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After I finished Amazon Unbound, I glanced at the Amazon Echo cylinder on my kitchen counter, next to a few cans of dog food that had just arrived from Amazon. Instead of the device, I imagined before me the sleek, smoothly bald and evenly tanned face of Jeff Bezos, eyes peering serenely back at me from below the glowing LED halo.
That minor hallucination made sense because — as we learn from Brad Stone’s portrait of Amazon and its founder — Alexa, the voice coming out of my Echo, more or less is Jeff Bezos. He came up with the idea of a smart speaker in January 2011, back in the era of Google Plus and the iPod Shuffle. Bezos emailed
