(Bloomberg)—Amazon.com Inc.’s Echo, a voice-activated speaker that plays music, answers questions and controls other hardware, now has a new skill: mocking Donald Trump.
Well, only mildly. Tell Alexa, the virtual assistant software that powers Echo, “Alexa, send Donald Trump to space,” and the machine responds with, “I think Jeff Bezos reserved him a seat on his Blue Origin rocket.” The new feature was included in a series of updates to Echo that added news sources to help users follow the U.S. presidential campaign.
Why space? This should explain it:
Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace https://t.co/9OypFoxZk3
— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 7, 2015
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In addition to being chief executive of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, is also betting on space exploration with Blue Origin, a rocket company. The tweet by Bezos (and it was only his fourth—ever) was in response to Trump’s earlier attack against Amazon and the Washington Post:
The @washingtonpost, which loses a fortune, is owned by @JeffBezos for purposes of keeping taxes down at his no profit company, @amazon.
— Donald J Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2015
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Bezos and the newspaper aren’t directly related, so any tax-saving measures wouldn’t work this way, as Austan Goolsbee, economics professor at the University Chicago’s Booth School of Business, suggested:
um, @realDonaldTrump, you are running on your business expertise? this is one of the dumbest things said about economics this week
— Austan Goolsbee (@Austan_Goolsbee) December 7, 2015
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What Amazon managed to do with the new Echo feature, however, is bring its boss’s varied interests together to have a little fun at Trump’s expense. Amazon is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2015 Top 500 Guide.
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