Tracking Flights, Finding Hotels and More with Kayak and Amazon Echo

If you own an Amazon Echo, Tap or Echo Dot (pictured above), there's a fairly good chance you have a love/hate relationship with Alexa, the platform's voice-controlled "personal assistant." Personally, I don't find much use for her beyond asking for the day's weather, turning on and off my Philips Hue lights and setting a cooking timer, but Alexa can (theoretically) help with much more than that when you add in third-party "skills."

One such skill, which launched today, is available through a partnership with Kayak. If you activate Alexa's latest plug-in, you'll be able to track flights, get hotel and rental car rates and even ask for travel destination suggestions based on your budget.

Here are a few examples of what you can ask:

I decided to take Alexa's new Kayak skill for a spin. Here's how that went:

As you can see, the results you get (if any) depend on what you ask and how you ask it. The flight-tracking function is by far the most useful at this point, but if you're away from a computer you might want to try asking for airfare details or hotel pricing and availability. Like with other skills, I imagine Kayak will become more useful over time, but for now I'd only bother installing it to track flights.

Have you tried Alexa's Kayak skill?