LG's new webOS-powered refrigerator has Amazon Alexa voice control

This will henceforth be known as the point when Amazon brought Alexa to everything.

The battle over making average home appliances "smart" rages on, and LG just put an additional foot forward with its new InstaView smart refrigerator that integrates Amazon Alexa voice assistant control. The setup is simple: this is a big refrigerator with a huge portrait-oriented 29-inch display, and while the base operating system is webOS the smarts all come from Amazon's Alexa.

The experience is entirely the same as using an Amazon Echo, so you don't have any drop-off in features when you move the intelligence to the fridge. So you can simply ask your fridge to answer questions, tell you about the weather and yes even play music and audiobooks — though LG isn't making any claims about how good the speaker system is on the refrigerator.

And as you'd expect, the Alexa integration makes the most sense when it comes to shopping for food directly from your refrigerator. On top of the fact that you can manage food items using the screen, you can now simple ask Alexa to build a shopping list and even order individual items to be delivered right away.

After what was initially a slow start, Amazon has built Alexa into a super popular smart speaker platform and quickly moved right beyond it to add the technology to just about anyone that wants to partner with the company. And the fact that these partners get the complete Alexa experience is extremely important.