Amazon Alexa branches out, appearing in the Lenovo Tab 4 with Home Assistant

Credit: Martyn Williams/IDG

Amazon Alexa is breaking free of the Echo. First she made friends with Cortana, and now she's popping up in the Lenovo Tab 4, thanks to the Home Assistant accessory introduced Thursday at IFA in Berlin.

When the Home Assistant ships in October (for $70), you'll be able to dock the Tab 4 or Tab 4 Plus to it and run all Alexa functions off the tablet. The Home Assistant handles the audio portion, picking up your voice commands and responding for Alexa.

The dock adjusts to fit the 8-inch and 10-inch tablet sizes in the Tab 4 line. It also charges the tablet and can be used to play music or other audio output from your tablet. Lenovo mentions how it can turn the tablet into a clock or weather station, but it could also lend better audio to movies streaming on the tablet. 

We'd love to see a dock that could do this for any tablet. But if the Home Assistant accessory takes off, maybe other vendors will get the same idea.