Can the Amazon Alexa virtual assistant be added on your distro?

There are several options to be able to use a virtual assistant on your GNU / Linux distro, in order to carry out inquiries or actions through voice commands. Both the Android operating system and iOS already have assistants such as Google Assistant and Siri respectively, in addition to having Cortana on Windows. But, in GNU / Linux it is somewhat more forgotten by the developers of these systems, although that does not prevent you from having them, as you can see.

If they developed native apps as they already exist for many other operating systems and devices, everything would be much easier and they would be better integrated. At the moment, all the options go through trying to "circumvent" these apps to be able to use them in your favorite distro by following one of the methods that I indicate here ...

As you well know, there are some apps available that are somewhat dubious or do not work well to implement this type of assistants natively (eg: Alexa). In the absence of official apps, you will only have explore these alternatives:

1. You can choose to install a android emulator in your distro, how can it be anbox. With this project you will be able to install any native Android app to be able to use it, and that also includes being able to install the official Alexa app for the Google operating system.
2. Another alternative to the above is use WINE or a Windows virtual machine to install the native Alexa app for the Microsoft operating system. Obviously, the WINE option is more comfortable, so you don't have to launch the MV every time you want to use Alexa.
3. Finally, another alternative is to follow this tutorial to make a device Amazon Echo compatible with Linux.

To have the wizard available Google AssistantAs an alternative to Alexa, you can also follow similar steps, as it is also available for systems like Android natively, so with an emulator (or an Android x86 MV) you could have it too.

In case you want Crab You have it a bit more complicated, since it would happen by using a virtual machine with macOS and from this being able to use the Apple assistant ...