In a way, this is a good step toward people writing applications that are good conversationally. Alexa does a good job of voice recognition but I agree that "conversations" are mostly about remembering the right wizard's incantation to make Alexa do something useful. Watching the (very simplified) demo, it's easy to see the seed of writing a useful digital assistant/Star Trek computer there but obviously someone(s) have a whole lot of work to do before we get anywhere near there.

What are the best alternatives?

The "Ok Google/Google Now" voice interactivity (or whatever the official name is) on Android phones is much better than Amazon's Alexa/Echo. It actually remembers context from sentence to sentence so you can say "What is the population of Chicago" and it will answer. Then you can say, "How long would it take me to drive there?" And it understands that you are still talking about Chicago.

Every interaction with Alexa is command, response, and that really limits what you can do with it.

There's nothing about Alexa's API that would prevent doing that, it already has the concept of a conversation and I think we'll see raid improvement in how people make use of that.

I agree. I'm just surprised that none of the base functions provided by Amazon take advantage of it. Compered to google it feels really basic and limited. I saw this as the owner of two Alexa's who uses them a lot. I'm constantly frustrated by the limitations even though it works well for certain things.

something that doesn't make me say this really long sentence to access the app

'Alexa tell app X to start my car'

Something that supports actual conversation which means not having the user respond immediately . For example its impossible to build a cooking app that walks me through the recipe because 'conversation' is over within X seconds. Of course you could do weird hacks like maintaining conversation on the server side based on sessionid, but that still requires user to constantly prefix their conversations with 'tell app X ..'

These basic UX limitations make it impossible to build any serious application that can do more than 'joke of the day' type of stuff. All the apps in alexa app store are totally useless 'fart noise of the day' type of garbage.

I think that's a product vs platform issue, especially having to prefix everything with the application. since you are building your own product, you get to avoid the routing problem entirely.

https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/conversation.html is one.

This, for travel, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_kw_vlCpcw

Disclosure: I work at the co that builds this

This is an open question