ALEXA STILL GROWING

After a busy 2017, Alexa is still on top -- and still evolving. 

Smart assistants had a huge year -- and none more so than Alexa. Let's recap the last twelve months and take a look at where she might be headed next.  Amazon's voice-activated virtual assistant Alexa has been one of the most captivating stories in tech since her arrival back at the end of 2014 -- and 2017 was her busiest year yet. It all started at CES, where Alexa seemed to be everywhere you looked. Amazon didn't have an official presence at the show, but that hardly seemed to matter. We counted dozens of different Alexa announcements from a wide assortment of eager partners scattered throughout the sprawl, and by the end of the week, Alexa's presence was enough to dwarf both Siri and the Google Assistant on our smart home scoreboard . Enlarge Image Along with six new Echo devices from Amazon, 2017 brought us a huge variety of third-party Alexa gadgets.  It wasn't just the smart home, though. Ford announced that it was integrating Alexa into its cars. Huawei announced it was bringing the Alexa-equipped Mate 9 phone to the US. Dish Network showed off Alexa's ability to channel surf , foreshadowing more formalized entertainment controls that would arrive later in the year . Brand after brand seemed to see Alexa as a rising tide, and everyone wanted a boat in the harbor. That set the table for a year of rapid expansion. If 2016 proved that Alexa was more than just a flash in the pan, 2017 showed that Amazon was determined to act accordingly. Along with a flurry of new features, Amazon introduced six brand-new Alexa gadgets this year: the Echo Look selfie camera, the touchscreen-equipped Echo Show , the second-gen Amazon Echo , the Zigbee-enhanced Echo Plus , the Echo Connect home phone replacement and the alarm clock-esque Echo Spot . Amazon also made sure to release gadgets and accessories to complement Alexa, starting with Echo Buttons and the Cloud Cam . The message to the competition is clear: Catch us if you can. On the software side, Alexa stayed busy learning all sorts of new tricks. She learned how to use smart locks and how to control color-changing bulbs . She learned how to trigger multiple devices with a single command using routines . The battery-powered Amazon Tap bypassed its own button and learned to listen for your command. Alexa calling and messaging became a thing, along with Alexa notifications . Long-awaited, multi-room music playback finally made its debut. Matching Google, Alexa learned to distinguish between different voices (though, as we learned, it's possible to fool her ). The good with the bad That's not to say that everything was a hit. Despite topping 10,000 skills back in February , it still isn't clear that the user base actually cares all that much (if you're an Alexa user, ask yourself how many different skills you can name, then compare that with the number of smartphone apps that come to mind). It's similarly unclear if Alexa's calling and messaging feature is as much of a gamechanger as Amazon might have hoped . We also questioned (and still question) the utility of the touchscreen on the Echo Show and the Echo Spot, and want to see Amazon put more of an emphasis on justifying it with a more robust and content-rich visual interface in 2018. Calling, messaging, and intercom functionality came to Amazon's Echo devices in 2017 -- complete with questions about privacy.  What's clear is that Amazon has put itself in a position to throw a whole lot of ideas at us, then see which ones stick. That was sufficient in 2017 as we waited for the competition to catch up -- I'm less convinced that it's a winning strategy moving forward, with competitors potentially just a killer feature or two away from making Alexa look like yesterday's news. Alexa met her fair share of controversy in 2017, too. Most of it centered around questions of privacy. In March, following some intriguing back and forth with law enforcement, Amazon ultimately handed over the microphone recordings of a murder suspect's Amazon Echo , but only after the suspect granted his approval. In May, the makers of the Alexa-enabled touchscreen intercom system Nucleus alleged that Amazon had "probably copied us" when it made the Echo Show. Then in the summer, users realized that there was no way to block incoming callers on their Echo devices -- Amazon issued a mea culpa and patched the issue a month later . We also saw the first signs of monetization for Alexa's library of skills this year, with brands starting to find ways of injecting ads into your Alexa skills , or charging subscription fees for premium features . That might be an unfortunate inevitability as smart speakers become more and more ubiquitous, but it should still be interesting to see exactly how it plays out. There's the potential for a lot of money to be made, but the real fight is to win over new customers -- and no smart speaker is going to want to be known as "the one with ads.