The first real Alexa phone is here — here’s what it’s like (AMZN)

To that end, it’s made it a point to put the voice assistant in everything that will take it, from its ever-growing line of Echo speakers to an army of third-party appliances. But as ubiquitous as Alexa is becoming, it still hasn’t managed to penetrate the most common gadget of them all: the smartphone.

That could soon change, as HTC is formally updating its commendable U11 smartphone on Monday to support Amazon’s digital helper. HTC says all US variants of the phone will start gaining access to the "HTC Alexa" app beginning on Monday. It’ll be available in the UK in July, and in Germany in August.

The U11 technically isn’t the first smartphone to support Alexa: the Huawei Mate 9 integrated with the assistant earlier this year. But Huawei’s implementation required you to manually open an app whenever you wanted to use it, which defeated the purpose of a "hands-free" assistant in the first place.

The U11, meanwhile, allows you to access Alexa just by calling out its name, the same way you would with an Echo device. It’s the first smartphone to let you do that with Alexa. (Though it won’t be the last.) It also means the U11 is now loaded with three separate assistants: Alexa, Google Assistant, and HTC’s own Sense Companion.

I’ve been testing Alexa on the HTC U11 for the past week or so. The short summary is that it’s an exciting step, but more so for Amazon than for consumers right now. Here’s a quick rundown of what it can and can’t do:

the U11’s "Edge Sense" feature

Alexa’s 15,000 or so "skills"
are still garbage

Amazon Music streaming service

found Alexa to be dumber

I don’t mind Alexa existing on the U11. It’ll be a genuine help to people who already own Alexa-compatible gadgets. And if there’s one thing we know about voice assistants right now, it’s that they’re all pretty bad. None of the major players can do everything, so having the option to use whichever works best for what you need is as much as you can really ask for.

But Alexa’s shortcomings on the U11 are a reminder of how messy the state of voice assistants is right now. This is a good step for Amazon in its quest to make Alexa unavoidable, but it’s more about laying the foundation than smoothing out the bumps in the road.