Amazon Echo now has the tools to talk to your whole house

Just two days after we learned that anyone can buy Amazon's Echo smart home speaker, the company is rolling out new tools that will let developers make gadget even smarter and work with more products.

The Amazon Echo is adding collection of free APIs and tools called the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) that support Amazon's cloud-based digital voice assistant, Alexa. The Echo syncs up with your phone so users can speak to Alexa (similar to Apple's Siri) to play music, read the news and weather aloud, order products directly from Amazon and control the lights in your house if they're compatible