Among the biggest consumer tech brands, Amazon appears to be some way out in front when it comes to smart home progress. With new models and new partner integrations, Amazon seems to be taking the lead on Apple and Google with the increasingly successful Echo, which is now being launched in the UK and Germany. After the debacle that was the Fire Phone, Amazon was essentially left with an AI-powered digital assistant called Alexa that it had developed to rival Apple’s Siri and Google Now. Somewhere inside Amazon’s Lab126 skunkworks, an engineer decided to chuck Alexa inside a device shaped like a Pringle’s can, and the rest is history. Amazon had almost accidentally tapped into a market that hadn’t been…