Apple’s Siri may have kicked-off the voice-enabled personal assistant trend, but it’s Amazon’s Alexa that is winning the game.
A week ago, Amazon announced it was releasing the Alexa Appkit, in hopes that hobbyist and legit developers will integrate the chatty voice technology behind the Echo into their own software and devices. The world’s largest e-tailer has opened up its technology out for free.
“By adding Alexa to your device, your users can request and receive information in the same way they would from an Amazon Echo,” read the company’s Getting Started Guide.
Alexa voice service technology for free
Much like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana, any device integrated with Alexa will act as a personal assistant, looking up stuff for you, and giving updates on the weather or the traffic.
Alexa Voice Service (AVS) was born out of the company’s work on the Echo, the oddball voice assistant and Bluetooth speaker for the home available for those willing to shell out $179.99. It’s considered to be Amazon’s second most successful hardware product since the launch of Kindle e-reader. The device is a voice controlled orb that can tell you the weather, give you traffic updates, play music, control connected lights and appliances, and buy things you fancy from Amazon.com.
Amazon underlines the following benefits of the Alexa Voice Service:
Create Frictionless Interfaces for Your Customers. Allow your customers to control your device in more intuitive ways with a natural language voice interface. By integrating AVS with your device, your customer no longer needs to get out their phone, find an app, and use their thumbs to invoke a command. All they have to do is ask via the microphone on your device.
Scale Quickly in the Cloud. AVS is cloud based and scales as your needs scale. You don’t need to worry about provisioning hardware and managing infrastructure to power your voice experience.
Integrate Easily. No experience with voice recognition or Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is required. Using AVS, add Alexa to your device in just a few hours. Leave understanding human speech to us and focus on your differentiated value add to customers.
Build for Free. Using AVS to power speech experiences on your devices is completely free.
Since it’s only an Alexa Voice Service (AVS) developer preview and not an official roll-out, we’re guessing it might take some time for Alexa-powered gadgets to pop up in the software and gizmo arena until December 2015. Whatever the case is, we’re sure it’s going to get rave reviews for its accuracy and intuitive grasp to understand organic language. Users will be able to talk to it easily without having to learn a lexicon of verbal commands.
