Amazon Echo keywords: wake words for shoppers, and voice search for sellers

An Echo listens for a wake word before it responds. Amazon's Alexa developer glossary defines the wake word as a command the customer says to tell Alexa they want to talk to her, and says customers can choose from a defined set of four: Alexa, Amazon, Echo and Computer.

After the wake word comes the utterance, the words that say what you want. Amazon's glossary gives the example "Alexa, open History Buff": Alexa is the wake word, and the rest opens a skill, which is like an app for Alexa.

For sellers, the interesting Amazon Echo keywords are the ones shoppers say after the wake word: add dog treats, reorder coffee pods, what is a good laptop for college.

In 2026 Amazon joined its two assistants into one. Alexa for Shopping brings together Rufus, the shopping assistant in the Amazon app, and Alexa+, and Amazon says it is available to US customers on the Amazon Shopping app and website and on Echo Show, with no Prime membership or Echo device required.

The biggest change is where shoppers ask. Amazon says customers can now ask Alexa for Shopping questions directly in the main Amazon search bar, and the search experience recognizes when a query is a question. Search is no longer only keywords; it is also conversation.

Amazon describes how the assistant works from the shopper's side, not how it picks products. What it does say is that Alexa for Shopping combines deep product knowledge, information from across the web and each customer's preferences and history. Our reading, as sellers, is that the parts you control, the listing's facts, attributes and images, and the reviews your product earns, are the raw material those answers are built from.

Several effects follow directly from the features Amazon lists. Price history on product pages makes inflated reference prices easy for shoppers to spot. Comparisons from search results put your attributes next to competitors', so missing details stand out. Reorders by voice favor products a customer has bought before, which rewards a good first purchase.

Amazon's Choice is often linked to voice shopping, because a spoken search has room for only one or two suggestions. Amazon's badge rules, covered in our guide to Amazon badges, say sellers cannot apply for Amazon's Choice; it weighs ratings, price, popularity, availability and fast delivery. Treat it as a result of performance, not a setting.

What that means in practice is the same work that helps any search: a relevant listing, good reviews, a fair price and stock that ships fast. Our guide to Amazon ranking factors sorts those by the evidence Amazon gives.

People speak longer, more natural phrases than they type: not coffee pods, but coffee pods that work with my machine. Those are long-tail searches, and they now reach the Amazon search bar as questions too. A listing that states compatibility, sizes, uses and audiences in plain words is ready for both.

Brands can also build for Alexa directly. Amazon's developer glossary describes skills as sets of actions or tasks that Alexa accomplishes, like apps for Alexa, built with the Alexa Skills Kit, a collection of APIs, tools and documentation. A custom skill defines the requests it can handle, called intents, and the words customers say to make those requests, called sample utterances; slots carry variable details such as a date.

Smart home skills work differently: Amazon's glossary says the smart home skill API provides a predefined set of utterances, so customers control devices with standard phrases. Device makers can build Alexa into their own hardware through the Alexa Voice Service, which is why third party devices appear alongside Amazon Echo and Echo Dot as Alexa-enabled devices.