Stephanie Condon
for Between the Lines
| July 21, 2021 — 16:00 GMT (17:00 BST)
| Topic: Artificial Intelligence
Alexa is well on its way to pervading all aspects of life — the AI assistant will follow you through your smart home to your car, into the office, and during your afternoon jog. Even so, Amazon says that building a completely ambient voice assistant is a long-term project that requires contributions from a large ecosystem of developers.
A better user experience
Interactive Media Skill Components: These components will shorten the time it takes for radio, podcast, and music providers to launch interactive experiences on Alexa. With the Song Request Skill Component, radio DJs can take song requests and dedications from listeners via Alexa. iHeartRadio will support this feature.
Multiplayer Games on Alexa: Developers will be able to use the Shared Activities API to build asynchronous multiplayer challenges to make sharing games with friends possible.
Send to Phone: Customers will be able to start an experience on their Alexa-enabled device and continue it on their mobile device.
More Proactive Experiences: Using Event-Based Triggers and Proactive Suggestions, developers can build proactive experiences for customers. For example, if a customer is leaving for work, customers could opt-in to have a skill proactively suggest that they lock their home.
Alexa Guard: Customers in the US will be able to connect to smart safety devices such as smoke, carbon monoxide, and water leak detectors, and Alexa Guard can send a mobile notification if these smart safety devices detect an incident.
Developer productivity and interoperability
Alexa Entities: This feature lets developer’s skills retrieve information from Alexa’s knowledge graph. Developers no longer have to source, acquire or manage their own catalog of general knowledge.
Customized Pronunciations: Self-service tool that allows developers to add custom pronunciation for rare words to their skill models.
Alexa Conversations: Expanding the availability of Alexa Conversations in beta in German, in all English locales, and a developer preview in Japan.
International Expansion of AVS and ACK: AVS, the tools for developers to build Alexa built-in devices, will soon be available in over 25 countries, and Amazon is adding support for multiple new languages including Spanish, French, Italian, and Japanese. Amazon is also expanding international availability of the Alexa Connect Kit for smart home devices.
Echo Devices Support Matter: Matter is a new interoperability protocol aimed at making it easier for customers to know that their smart home devices will work with all major voice services. Amazon is announcing that they will upgrade Echo family devices to work with Matter. This includes most Echo and Echo Dot devices and all Echo Studio, Echo Flex, Echo Plus, and Echo Show devices.
Voice Interoperability Initiative (VII) The VII program is committed to providing customers with choice and flexibility on the assistants that they interact with on a given device. It includes nearly 90 members, including Facebook, Intel, Qualcomm, Sonos, Garmin, and other global brands. Amazon will soon be releasing the Multi-agent Experience (MAX) Toolkit, which provides middleware components for multi-agent integrations.
Alexa Custom Assistant Momentum: Alexa Custom Assistant helps brands create their own custom voice assistant built on Alexa technology, with a unique wake word, voice, personality, and capabilities. Amazon previously announced global automaker Stellantis as the launch customer for ACA. Other customers now include Qualcomm, Garmin, and Elektrobit, and Continental.
Verizon smart display: Verizon will soon launch a smart display that leverages the ACA technology. Verizon Customers will use Verizon Smart Display to set up their new service and manage their account, including any troubleshooting, giving them more flexibility to oversee their broadband options
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Stephanie Condon
for Between the Lines
| July 21, 2021 — 16:00 GMT (17:00 BST)
| Topic: Artificial Intelligence