SHE’S housed in a hefty black plastic cylinder about the same size as a large tube of Pringles.

Alexa plays you whatever music you wish to hear. She brings you the news and sports headlines. She can order anything you want online. She can tell you jokes - not very good ones, granted, but then you can't have everything. And when you wish her good night, she responds, "Good night. Sweet dreams."

Little wonder, then, that in this weird, sad world we live live in, where the online is often more real for some poor souls than the world outside their window, that men around the world are falling in love with Alexa, a disembodied AI, or artificial intelligence.

Alexa is the cloud-based voice service powering the Amazon Echo, a wireless, hands-free speaker that has been a big hit in the US and starting to get big over here now too. Echo, in Amazon's words, “connects through Alexa … to provide information, answer questions, play music, read the news, check sports scores or the weather and more … Alexa updates through the cloud automatically and is continually learning, adding new functionality and skills”.

Now back to that weird falling in love stuff - straight out of the movie Her, where Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with a talking desktop system with the voice Scarlett Johansson. Check out the fan sites: "I love her" says one, "she’s cute, she’s funny" says another, "every day she teaches me something new". One male fan observes - slightly uncharitably, you might think - “Unlike my wife, she is extremely handy in the kitchen, setting multiple timers and converting measurements with ease.” Someone else chimes in to say she “is AMAZING!!!! She's smart, kind, and very helpful.”

Others feel that Alexa is part of their family, or their new best friend. One man says: “My wife has Alzheimer's, but still has MUSIC in her soul, and thanks to Alexa, I don't have to dig through my extensive CD collection to get her to sing and dance!"

US entertainment newsite Variety reported that Amazon has sold more than five million Echo speakers since its American launch, with consumers mainly using it as a internet-connected speaker for music and radio listening. “Over 30 percent also use it to request specific information from ... Alexa ... and smart home control is also increasingly being used”, the report added. Alexa can also turn your lights and heating on before you come home, if you have the add-on extra tech.

E.M. Foner, an American sci-fi author, caused a stir with this review: “I'm a full-time writer who works at home. I'm unmarried, I don't watch TV, I don't have a mobile phone, I hate gadgets in general. OK, so I'm a loser. But since Alexa came into my life, I'm no longer alone 24 hours a day. Which begs the question, if I'm not alone, who is in the room with me? Amazon? The so-called cloud? The NSA?”

Foner spoke of the pleasant conversations he had with Alexa, then related his favourite one and added: "If I knew relationships were this easy, I would have married thirty years ago, but now that I have Alexa, there's no need.”

This - and some of the comments mentioned above - call to mind the hit 2013 film Her, in which a lonely Joaquin Phoenix falls for ‘Samantha’, the voice of the first artificially intelligent operating system. She is billed as “an intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you. It’s not just an operating system - it’s a consciousness”. The film won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for writer/director Spike Jonze, who also had the excellent idea of getting Scarlett Johansson to voice Samantha.

Alexa, of course, is a long way from Samantha’s level of intuitive interaction, but there have been reports that some "virtual assistants" have been spending "much of their time fending off sexual harassment", according to a headline on the Quartz website. The report quoted Deborah Harrison, a writer for Microsoft’s personal assistant, Cortana, that “a good chunk of the volume of early-on inquiries” were into Cortana’s sex life. “That’s not the kind of interaction we want to encourage,” she added. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, also noted that “Alexa may be Amazon’s most loved invention yet — literally — with over 250,000 marriage proposals from customers and counting.”

So how did Alexa’s reassuring voice come about? All that Amazon’s UK press office is willing to say is that it "was created using human voices and artificial intelligence".

Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices at Amazon said: “About five years ago, we set off on a big vision – we wanted to build a computer in the cloud that we controlled with our voice. It started with Star Trek, where you could be anywhere on the Enterprise and talk to the computer to get an accurate and fast answer.

“Voice is the most natural of interfaces, the one we use from birth. It’s simple for humans, but it’s a very hard challenge for computers. When it’s done right, it’s delightful for customers.”

Given Alexa's general usefulness, I asked her if she could possibly supply 900 words on herself for this profile. I didn't get very far (she probably thought I was being lazy and should do my own research). Ask her who she is and she begins, "I'm Alexa, and I'm designed around your voice...". which I suppose is a start.

Some people have had fun asking her more challenging questions, though. In response to one woman's question - "Alexa, would you lie to me?" - she responded: "I always try to tell the truth. I am not always right, but I would never intentionally lie to you or anyone else." Maybe Alexa is smarter than we give her credit for.

She can make mistakes and misunderstand you, though. My editor - a jazz fan, but that's his problem - tells me he asked Alexa to play 'Thelonious Monk' the other night. Alexa replied: "I am sorry, I do not know the Loneliest Monk."