Now you can ask Alexa to send your mom flowers
The Amazon Echo digital assistant has a new trick that lets you place an order with 1-800-Flowers via a voice command.
Amazon's Alexa is gaining quite the repertoire as a personal assistant. 1-800-Flowers introduced a new skill for Alexa on Tuesday, making it easier than ever for you to take care of your Mother's Day shopping.
Alexa is the digital assistant built into a trio of Echo devices: the original Amazon Echo, the Amazon Echo Dot and the Amazon Tap. Alexa also works with certain Fire TV remotes. Alexa responds to voice commands and uses skills, which are essentially apps within the Echo platform, to work with more and more third parties.
Ordering flowers is Alexa's latest trick. At the moment, you can't customize much. You'll have to pick from four options for arrangements based on the occasion, and you can't add your own message to the flowers. You'll also need to set up the delivery address using a 1-800-Flowers account.
1-800-Flowers seems ready to embrace new technology, as the company also will enable customers to order arrangements through Facebook's new Messenger bots. As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the company's F8 developer conference earlier this month, "To order 1-800-Flowers, you never have to call 1-800-Flowers again."