You can now buy booze from Australia’s incarnation of Amazon, but you can’t tell Alexa to do it for you while you’re in the kitchen, or anywhere else for that matter.
World Gin Day was Saturday, and it marks a time when it seems nice to have a bit of a tipple, if you’re into that.
If you had run out of gin for that day, you could always pop down to the nearest bottle-o, but if you’re more preferring of staying indoors, alcohol has been added to the Amazon Australia store.
The combination of wine, beer, and spirits brings more stuff to choose from on the online store, but perhaps in a bizarre twist, Amazon hasn’t embraced its own Alexa smart voice assistant for the service.
Even though you can ask Alexa to order a pizza from Domino’s, Amazon’s addition of alcohol to its product listing doesn’t come with support for its own voice assistant. It means if you suddenly find you run out of gin or a port to cook with, you can’t say “Hey Alexa, order a bottle of Archie Rose Outside Gin” or “Hey Alexa, order Grant Burge Port”, even if both are listed on Amazon in Australia.
While the addition of alcohol to Amazon Australia expands what Australians have available to them, if anything, the most useful feature might be a greater marketplace for wineries to use, with Australian winemakers and sellers able to join and sell on the platform.
Australians, of course, have a variety of places to buy wine from online, not least of which typically includes a winemaker’s online virtual cellar door, which if you love and support a winery is typically one of the best and most obvious ways to do so. However, Amazon’s addition now means you can get a bottle alongside a Kindle or an Alexa-enabled speaker, even if you can’t order from an Alexa speaker.
One thing at a time, we guess. Perhaps we’ll see support for that in the near future, as the hands-free smart home starts to become more of a thing.
