Amazon wants Alexa to do more than just play your music
Amazon wants Alexa to do more than just play your music
He boasts that Alexa, his artificial intelligence assistant, can perform more than 50,000 skills.
The problem is that most people still use it mainly to turn on the lights, play music or program the pasta.
Google for voice assistant supremacy is accelerating efforts to make Alexa more useful, from improving their conversation skills to offering financial incentives to external developers to make better Alexa compatible speech applications, what Amazon calls skills .
Last month, Amazon expanded the ability of Alexa developers to charge users for purchases within their abilities, such as premium content from a media service, or suggestions or special powers in a game.
Breakthrough skill
The Alexa skills store started with more downloadable options compared to the Apple App Store. Amazon said that Alexa's skills were more than 50,000 in September.
Number of requests
or skills available in the first seven quarters
Dear users of intelligent loudspeakers in the United States, by brand
The goal is to encourage developers to acquire better skills and, ultimately, make Alexa a more valuable platform, says Amazon, like Apple Inc. did with the App Store.
"The phenomenon is exactly what we saw with the App Store for the iPhone," said Ahmed Bouzid, a former product manager at Alexa and now the CEO of Witlingo, which creates tools to help create and launch voice applications for the platforms. Alexa and Google. It is "pure economics and motivation to develop great skills for which people will actually pay more."
Amazon has sold more than 47 million devices in the Echo family since its launch in late 2014, giving it a share of approximately 51% of the smart speaker market, according to Loup Ventures. The prices of the devices currently range from $ 40 for a Dot the size of a hockey puck up to $ 230 for its latest leaked version. Last month, Amazon introduced 15 new and updated devices in the family, including an amplifier and a Microwave oven enabled for Alexa.
Some Echo customers, like Suzanne Plunkett of Chicago, 59, feel they are not getting the value they expected. She said that since receiving her Echo as a Christmas gift in 2016, she has used it only a few times, "twice to ask for a joke." One reason why he has not taken the time to solve it, he said, is that I can just look at a clock or turn on a light. "It just seemed like a trick," he added.
Part of Amazon's response has been to improve Alexa's ability to carry out human-like conversations. Now respond to a series of commands on the same subject or offer a hunch, like someone might want to turn off the lights when they lie down.
Rohit Prasad, Alexa's chief scientist, said that Amazon has made thousands of skills searchable. When a consumer asks how to get a shirt stain, Alexa will reduce the skills it offers, evaluate which one has the best response and use it to respond, in this case, with a Good Housekeeping tool that offers stain removal. Advice and instructions
"I think we're reaching a point where customers say, 'I'm sure Alexa can do a lot more things than I know of,'" said Tom Taylor, Amazon's senior vice president at Alexa.
Subscriptions and other purchases within the skills that Amazon is now allowing typically cost from 99 cents to $ 1.99, with discounts for Prime members. They follow Amazon's move last year to reward developers with payments based on downloads and usage.
The incentives are aimed at getting companies and people like Gal Shenar, a software developer based in Boston, to develop stronger Alexa skills that improve the quality of their app store.
Mr. Shenar created a game for Alexa users called "Escape the Room". Users get an imagined situation, like a car completely submerged in water, and use verbal commands to explore their surroundings, find tools and try to escape. He added suggestions that are available for purchase, and users, who number in the hundreds of thousands, have begun to buy them constantly.
Still, Shenar said, while "many of the potential profits are unlocked" in Apple's App Store, "that's still not really possible with Alexa." Monetizing the aspects of creating things for Alexa is "going to make a big difference in how companies approach to develop skills for the platform," he predicts.
Michele Audish, 20, until recently used Echo from her family just for music or to turn on the lights, but recently asked Alexa about a giant box she saw in the nearby Los Angeles Grove shopping complex. It turned out to be a "Jurassic World" ad. Afterwards, Alexa launched her by playing an adventure game with the option of choosing her own Jurassic adventure. She paid $ 1.99 and played for about an hour, answering yes or no questions to try to help save the dinosaurs.
"I had never played a game," he said, adding that he enjoyed the experience. "I did not even know that that was something you could do."
Write to Laura Stevens in laura.stevens@wsj.com
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