With regards to locking in to home automation, Alexa has many integrations with the major home automation brands and hardware. For instance, my house is nearly

With regards to locking in to home automation, Alexa has many integrations with the major home automation brands and hardware. For instance, my house is nearly all Z-Wave and I use a Wink Hub to tie them together. It took possibly 30 seconds to integrate Wink to Alexa and now I can control my entire house through voice commands such as "turn downstairs off" or "turn master bedroom on". Even though I have iPhone and many HomeKit enabled devices, the fact that Wink and Alexa support so many integrations keeps me from even attempting to buy into a very locked in ecosystem like Apple or Google are attempting. Finally, in the absence of a pre-existing integration, you can always write your own, which can't really be said for any of the other major players that aren't completely roll your own. I've been pleasantly surprised by the flexibility the Alexa platform has shown, and it's becoming increasingly part of our home workflow because of how well it plays with other things.