Tag: Amazon Echo

You Can Now Order Domino’s Pizza From Amazon Echo

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon Echo’s virtual assistant Alexa just gained another useful skill just in time for the Super Bowl. Popular pizza delivery chain Domino’s utilized Alexa Skills Kit, a developer tool kit for Echo, to add the capabilities of placing and tracking orders by voice commands to Alexa. Echo users simply need to enable the Domino’s skill within the Amazon Alexa app by linking their account to their Domino’s Pizza profile and they are good to go. By doing so, Domino’s is the first in the pizza and quick-service restaurant industries to integrate with Amazon Echo.

What Brands Need To Do
As Alexa’s list of skills continues to grow, Amazon Echo is becoming increasingly business-friendly, creating a unique platform for brands to connect with consumers in their living rooms via a voice-based conversational interface. For brands, this kind of interface brings new challenges in discovery because they only present limited options to users. Therefore, brands will need to be active in getting on board with those voice-activated devices via deep integrations or partnerships.

For more information on how brands can develop authentic brand voices and navigate the new discovery systems outside of standard SEO, check out the Conversational Interfaces section in our Outlook 2016.

 

Source: CNN Money

 

Header image courtesy of Amazon on YouTube

Amazon Echo Pushes Into Traditional Retail Nationwide

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
More than a year after its debut, Amazon Echo is finally coming to third-party physical retail stores for the first time. Amazon’s smart speaker will be available at Staples, The Home Depot, Sears, Fred Meyer and various other big box and electronics stores. Amazon plans to make it available in more than 3,000 retail locations across the U.S. in time for holiday shopping.

Market Impact
Making the Echo widely available in traditional brick-and-mortar retail stores signals Amazon’s confidence in pushing its leading product in the smart home to the mass market. The expanded shelf presence in turn can help familiarize consumers with connected devices like Echo, propelling the smart home market forward.

 

Source: GeekWire

Amazon Echo Adds Local Business Listings From Yelp

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
With a software update pushed out over-the-air over the weekend, Amazon’s smart speaker Echo now pulls local business listings from Yelp, making it possible for users to ask Alexa for basic information about any local business, including phone numbers, addresses, opening hours and more. After answering an inquiry, Echo also offers additional information sourced from Yelp about the resulting businesses in its smartphone app, including Yelp ratings and price range.

What Brands Need To Do
Since Amazon surprised everyone with the launch of Echo about a year ago, the Alexa-enabled smart speaker has been quickly gaining new functions, adding support for smart home devices in April and integrating event information from StubHub in August. As its list of features continues to grow, Echo is becoming increasingly business-friendly, creating a unique platform for brands to connect consumers in their living rooms in a conversational context. Therefore, it is important for local businesses and national chain-store brands to make sure their store information is listed correctly on Yelp, so as to be accessible via Echo.

 

Source: Marketing Land

Amazon Echo Integrates StubHub For Event Info

Posted on by Lab Team

What Happened
Amazon’s connected speaker is quickly expanding beyond its initial functionality, adding support for a handful of new third-party platforms, including popular event booking and ticket sale platform StubHub, as well as several smart-home platforms such as Cree. The StubHub integration, in particular, stands out for it customizes the information based on location and utilizes Alexa, Echo’s embedded virtual assistant, to offer info about events nearby within a natural, conversational context.

What Brands Should Do
As a nascent media platform, devices like Amazon Echo and, allegedly, Apple TV – both well-poised to become the central hubs of connected devices and all sorts of services – are slowly and surely gaining momentum as the future standard of digital interactions. And brands, especially those in the ecommerce and smart-home space, need to be mindful of its potential. For brands that wish to experiment with Amazon Echo, there is the Alexa Skills Kit, a free SDK that allows for creating new features for Echo’s platform and integrating branded digital assets with Alexa’s conversational U/I.

 

Source: Engadget
Header image courtesy of Amazon Echo Product Page

Amazon Surprises With Echo, A Smart Speaker With A Built-in Virtual Assistant

Posted on by Lab Team

Read original story on: The Verge

Out of nowhere, Amazon announced a new product named Echo, the world’s first smart speaker that comes with an always-on, Siri-like virtual assistant. Connected to the cloud via Wi-Fi, the AI assistant, dubbed “Alexa,” can provide you with news, weather, and even Wikipedia-generated answers to random questions. When connected with your mobile device, it can also perform tasks such as setting alarm clocks and managing to-do lists, all handsfree via voice command.

Of course, the wireless speaker also serves its traditional purpose: playing music. It has built-in support for Amazon Prime Music, iHeartRadio, and TuneIn, it’s also fully Bluetooth compatible, making playback from Spotify, Pandora, and other audio apps from other devices possible.