Amazon's smartphone flop was the best thing that happened to Alexa

Amazon's Fire Phone may have been a surprisingly auspicious failure, I keep thinking as I watch the expansion of Alexa, the company's cloud-based virtual assistant. Artificial intelligence is the future, specifically, voice-controlled AI that allows you to interact with a multitude of apps and services without using a screen; that's the point that Amazon underscored yesterday when it unveiled its newest hardware. But the event wasn't really about hardware. It was all about extending Alexa, makin...