Dive Brief:
- Amazon Web Services has opened up Amazon Lex, the voice technology
that fuels the Alexa platform, to all cloud computing customers, according
to a press release. The unlocking of Amazon
Lex means developers can insert talking virtual assistants into chat
services such as Facebook Messenger, Twilio or Slack.
- Until now, Amazon noted few developers were able to build apps with
the automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding that
characterizes Amazon Lex. With the company's move, developers can
construct apps containing speaking aides to check the weather, book
travel, order food and perform a plethora of other tasks.
- Amazon specified Capital
One, Freshdesk, Hubspot, Liberty Mutual, Ohio Health,
Vonage and the American Heart Association have already tapped Amazon Lex
for conversational apps. The American Heart Association used Amazon Lex’s
AI technology to ease its registration process for Heart Walk events, and
Freshdesk harnessed it to provide personalized customer service.
AI is venturing across the consumer and marketing landscape,
and Amazon is aiming to be a key driver in its spread. Amazon Alexa and its
related products such as Echo are doing so by entering people’s homes — millions of Alexa devices have sold — but Amazon has a much bigger
vision for its voice technology careening across industries and into corners of
the digital universe that the company might otherwise not touch or touch
infrequently. In creeping into those corners, it hopes to outmaneuver its voice
competitors Siri at Apple, Bixby at Samsung and Assistant at Google.
Winning the voicebot battle can have enormous
implications for business as more consumers use their voice and not their
fingers to engage online. Propelling e-commerce is a big play, a strategy
befitting Amazon’s core competency. It’s already possible to shop products sold on Amazon,
discover nearby restaurants and request Uber or Lyft rides from Alexa. The
opening up of Amazon Lex will likely thrust Amazon's voice capabilities into
untold areas of commerce. The revenue potential is impactful. RBC Capital
Markets has estimated Alexa could generate
$10 billion for Amazon by 2020 from device sales and voice
orders.
The news follows Amazon's recent release of a development
kit for the hardware and software that powers its Echo devices' voice
recognition. Together, these two developments have the potential to
help Alexa boost its position as the dominant voice assistant if enough
manufacturers and developers jump on board.
#MobileMarketing #Application
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