Amazon.com has launched Alexa, its voice assistant who competes with Apple’s Siri, to developers so they can build chat features into their own apps, CTO Werner Vogels said.

Amazon is on a mission to become the top player in voice-controlled computing, after losing out in the mobile sector to Apple and Google. Vogels said Amazon’s headway in processing how humans write and speak would make conversational assistants, or “chatbots”, more helpful than they’ve been in the past.

“There’s massive acceleration happening here,” he told an Amazon cloud-computing summit in San Francisco. “The cool thing about having this running as a service in the cloud, instead of in your own datacentre or on your own desktop, is that we can make Lex better continuously by the millions of customers that are using it.”