Google tries hard to keep Amazon’s Alexa from winning CES

Amazon’s Alexa assistant was crowned “winner” of CES, the Computer Electronics Show, last year. While Amazon didn’t have a splashy presence at the show — though there was a bizarrely large Echo speaker in one hallway — the fact that so many gadget makers were pledging to bake Alexa into their products became the dominant story of CES. This year, Google, which has a...