The "Ok Google/Google Now" voice interactivity (or whatever the official name is) on Android phones is much better than Amazon's Alexa/Echo. It actually remembers context from sentence to sentence so you can say "What is the population of Chicago" and it will answer. Then you can say, "How long would it take me to drive there?" And it understands that you are still talking about Chicago.

Every interaction with Alexa is command, response, and that really limits what you can do with it.

something that doesn't make me say this really long sentence to access the app

'Alexa tell app X to start my car'

Something that supports actual conversation which means not having the user respond immediately . For example its impossible to build a cooking app that walks me through the recipe because 'conversation' is over within X seconds. Of course you could do weird hacks like maintaining conversation on the server side based on sessionid, but that still requires user to constantly prefix their conversations with 'tell app X ..'

These basic UX limitations make it impossible to build any serious application that can do more than 'joke of the day' type of stuff. All the apps in alexa app store are totally useless 'fart noise of the day' type of garbage.

https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/conversation.html is one.

This, for travel, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_kw_vlCpcw

Disclosure: I work at the co that builds this

This is an open question