It's probably been on their roadmap for a while, before Alexa came out. Re: Alexa/echo - think there is an opportunity for someone to manufacture cheap USB array mics for far field capture.

Still, having this paid and cloud based puts a limit to types of things where you'd use it. I will use it in my own apps for now but will swap to a OSS speech recognition library running locally as soon as one emerges that is good enough.