Amazon aims to breathe new life into Alexa by releasing developer tools and features – TechCrunch

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Amazon is giving its Alexa voice platform a shot at its arm after seeing further dips in skill growth over the past year, indicating lagging interest from third-party voice app developers. At the company’s Alexa Live developer event today, the company announced a slew of new features and tools for the developer community — its largest release of new tools to date, in fact. Among the new releases are those that encourage Alexa device owners to discover and interact with Alexa skills, new tools to monetize skills and other updates that will push customers to once again make Alexa a part of their daily routine.

The retailer’s hopes for Alexa as a voice shopping platform may not have come true as he had hoped, as only a small segment of Alexa customers have actually purchased Amazon.com through smart speakers. However, Alexa’s larger footprint and developer community is still fairly large, Amazon said today, noting that there are “millions” of Alexa devices used “billions of times” each week, and more than 900,000 registered developers have deployed more than 130,000 skills. Alexa.

However, Amazon has yet to solve the challenge of helping customers find and discover the skills they want to use — something that has historically been difficult for audio-only devices. This has been improved somewhat with the release of Alexa devices with screens, such as the Alexa Show, which offers a visual component.

But by and large, Alexa device owners continue to use its basic functions — controlling the smart home, playing music, setting alerts and reminders, making lists and other simple inquiries. It has not yet produced what would be considered, by most people, a “runaway” audio application.

Image credits: Amazon

In an effort to address this issue with more features, Amazon says it will offer a way for developers to create tools for their skills, which customers can then add to their Echo Show or any other Alexa device with a screen later this year. Developers will also be able to create distinct skill cards to enhance their home screen rotation skills.

In other words, Amazon’s solution is to make Alexa more like a mobile device in terms of app discovery. While it might come in handy for those who have Alexa devices with screens, this doesn’t bode well for Alexa’s future as a voice-only platform.

Meanwhile, for voice-only devices, developers will now be able to suggest their skills when Alexa responds to common requests, such as “Alexa, tell me a story,” “Alexa, let’s play a game” or “Alexa, I need a try,” among others. . Alexa will begin providing skill-specific suggestions based on customers’ use of similar skills, while new “context detection” mechanisms will allow customers to use language and natural phrases to accomplish tasks across skills. Of course, Amazon has tried other ways to suggest skills before, but these have had minimal effects on the larger skills ecosystem. (Some of the efforts even annoyed users.)

Amazon also said it is expanding the ways developers can get paid for their skills.

Already, it offers tools like consumables, paid subscriptions, and skill purchases. Now, it will add support for paid skills, a new skill purchase that allows customers to pay a one-time fee to access content provided by the skill. It will now also expand its skilled procurement operations in India and Canada.

So far, skill-based purchases have not brought in much profit so far. A 2019 report found Alexa Skills revenue in the first 10 months of the year was just $1.4 million, well short of Amazon’s goal of $5.5 million. It is not certain that another way to make a purchase will change this trend.

Amazon hasn’t talked about how much its developers have made, instead just saying that developer revenue from skilled purchases “doubled” on a year-over-year basis.

Amazon will now try to tap into the developer community to increase sales on the retail site as well.

With the new ‘Shopping Actions’, developers can sell Amazon products with their skills. For example, a role-playing game could suggest customers to purchase the tabletop version, as does the science fiction game Starfinder. Developers can now also earn affiliate revenue on referrals of their products.

Music and media skill developers will be able to use new tools for more entertaining experiences, such as the song request skill that DJs can use to receive song requests via Alexa, which iHeartRadio will embrace. Others will shorten the time it takes radio, podcast, and music providers to start interactive experiences.

Other new features aim to make the skills more practical and useful.

Image credits: Amazon

For example, restaurants will get access to the Food Skill API that will allow them to create takeout and delivery orders experiences. A new Send to Phone feature will allow developers to connect their skills to mobile devices, and new triggers based on events and proactive suggestions will enable new experiences – such as the skill that reminds users to lock their homes when they leave. Amazon-owned Whole Foods will use these features for a curbside pickup trial later this year, the company says.

Alexa’s refurbishment support, which allows customers to rearrange common household items such as laundry detergent or batteries, will also expand to include parts for better connectivity with other types of home and smart devices. Thermostat makers Carrier and Resideo will use this to revamp their air filters and Bissell will use this with their vacuum cleaners.

Meanwhile, makers of safety devices — such as smoke, carbon monoxide, and water leakage detectors — will be able to link to the Alexa Guard security system, to send push notifications to mobile devices.

Amazon is also introducing a suite of new tools that make skill creation easier for developers, including the ability to use Alexa entities, which is essentially Amazon’s private collection of Wikipedia-like public knowledge. They’ll also get access to new tools to help with personalized pronunciation, as well as a US-only Alexa chat natural language feature (now in beta in Germany, developer preview in Japan and live in all English) A longer list of tools focus on regional expansions for groups Existing tools (such as AVS and ACK), and others that enable better interoperability with smart home devices – such as those that allow unique alert words, among others.

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