People interested in Amazon's Echo voice-activated information and smart home control system can now test the service online for free.
To have a conversation with Alexa - the name given to Amazon's assistant bot, who responds via a speaker - users can open Web site Echosim (presumably short for "Echo simulator") and log in using their Amazon account details.
Amazon's Alexa voice service is available to external developers, making the system accessible on other devices besides the Echo system, for example smart speaker Triby, or on iOS devices through paid app Lexi.
Tech rivals Google and Apple both play host to voice-activated information bots via their respective mobile operating systems - Google Now on Android and Siri on iOS - but both are trailing Amazon where voice-activated home control systems are concerned.
While Google unveiled its Google Home system at its annual developer conference earlier this month, at the time of writing it is not available for testing online, and Apple's answer to the trend is still in the pipeline.
However, users of Google cloud services such as Google docs have long been able to use Google's voice recognition software as a means of text input.
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