• by Chuck Martin , Staff Writer, February 7, 2016

Super Bowl viewers met Alexa.

Or viewed another way, The Internet of Things just got introduced to the masses in a very big way.

It’s not that Amazon’s Siri-like Echo is a brand new product, having officially launched last year, but it is new to many of the masses.

The Super Bowl commercial for Echo used big names, tapping football great Dan Marino and well-known actor Alec Baldwin.

While most consumers are unaware of The Internet of Things, they all know Amazon. And they now have seen that Amazon has something that can change how they interact inside their homes.

The 30-second commercial starts with music being played at a party until Alec Baldwin says “Alexa stop!” And the music stops playing. But Echo does more than just play music.

Baldwin describes how Echo (via Alexa’s cloud-based voice service) can stream music, order things, turn lights on and then shows how Alexa can quickly retrieve information by answering normally spoken questions.

Baldwin and Marino then have an Alexa-empowered exchange:

While consumers may or may not have been persuaded to sign into Amazon and commit $179 for a device that makes it easier to connect and operate things in the home (as well as buy things, of course), the commercial may have done wonders to introduce consumers to IoT capabilities.

The Internet of Things is more about capabilities than specific products.

And now some marketing dollars are being used to show consumers what types of IoT activities they can expect to have at their fingertips or be triggered by what they say.

Both Alexa -- and money --  talk.