Amazon has been hard at work, releasing new device after new device, week after week. As part of the introduction of the Alexa Tablet series announced today, the company's Senior Vice President of Devices and Alexa, Panos Panay, sat with a small group of reporters. In answering our questions, Panay teased new products and design paradigms coming from the company.

The new Alexa Tablet series replaces the popular Fire tablet family, and places the company's AI assistant front and center. To my knowledge, it was the first hardware product by Amazon with Alexa as its brand, so I asked Panay to confirm. I ran through a list of Amazon product names. from Echo, Fire TV and Kindle, to Ring, Blink and Eero, even considering the now-defunct Halo brand.

Panay responded in the affirmative, so I asked if the Alexa tablet series was the beginning of a push into more hardware with the AI's name attached. Panay first said "No, it's just when it makes sense," before later saying coyly, "not that you've seen."

It's pretty typical for any company of Amazon's size to have plenty of prototypes and concepts floating around in multiple R&D labs worldwide, and for any number of them to bear the Alexa moniker is just as likely. Panay has said to me before that there's probably a foldable Kindle in experimental form somewhere, too. His response here did not reveal much.

But then I asked what I thought was a more specific, technical question about whether there was a name for the software interface that adds the Alexa layer to the tablets' Android operating systems.

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