“Alexa, what are your skills?”
Amazon Alexa is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013.
It is integrated into Amazon Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers as well as Echo Show and Echo Spot devices.
Alexa’s technology allows users to access a wide variety of functionality and information, such as playing music, setting alarms, triggering reminders, streaming podcasts, making to-do lists, playing audiobooks, and updating traffic, weather, sports, and other real-time information, such as local news.
Alexa can perform these functions out-of-the-box, usually triggered by a “wake-word“ to alert an Alexa-enabled device of a vocal command. Alexa listens for the command and performs the appropriate function, or task, to answer a question or command.
Alexa does this by converting sound waves into text which allows it to gather information from various sources. Behind the scenes, the data gathered is passed to multiple sources to recover suitable and accurate answers.
In addition to performing pre-set functions, Alexa can also perform auxiliary tasks through third-party “skills” that users can enable.
Amazon drives contributions to advancing Alexa’s functionality through the launch of its Alexa Skills Kit (ASK).
According to Amazon, the kit is a collection of tools that enable 3rd party developers to build new voice-driven capabilities for Alexa.
The development of these custom skills makes the technology more attractive and diversified to meet various use cases.
Today, there are more than 100,000 Alexa skills available, which let you control the best smart home devices, order pizza, play trivia games, listen to the news and weather, shop online and even start your car.
You can Send a Hug, donate to non-profit organizations, get home security alerts and health emergency help through Amazon Skills as well.
As innovation in voice technology continues using ASK, we are particularly curious about potential unexplored use cases such as;
- Voice interaction payments in physical stores,
- How voice interaction can be explored in collaboration with augmented reality and other Internet of Things (IoT) technologies to improve user experiences in diverse fields such as medicine, gaming, law, and retail commerce.
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Photo by Nicolas J Leclercq
