What Happened
Amazon continues to expand Alexa’s footprint by opening up its far-field microphone and voice processing technology to third-party manufacturers to integrate into their own voice-activated devices. The new development kit also includes access to Amazon’s proprietary software for wake word recognition, beamforming, noise reduction, and echo cancellation as well as reference client software for local device control and communication with the Alexa Voice Service. Right now this development kit is by invitation only, which hardware makers can apply for one here.
What Brands Need To Do
With Alexa Voice Services, Amazon is already encouraging other companies to build the Alexa into their own products. Now with this new developer tool, device makers will have an easier and less expensive way to incorporate Amazon’s voice recognition tech into more voice-activated connected devices, potentially expanding Alexa’s reach even further.
A new CIRP report estimates that there are now 8.2 million customers who own an Amazon Echo device, up 60% from the 5.1 million Echo users that CIRP cited in November 2016, making it one of the fastest growing connected home devices in the past few years. Led by Alexa, voice-activated devices are poised to change the way many customers search for information and interact with businesses. Brands seeking to stay ahead of the curve will need to start developing a conversational strategy to figure out an authentic way to establish a brand presence on the conversational devices.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed with Drizly for Miller Lite is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Barrett ([email protected]) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: The Verge
