Amazon Puts Money Where Mouth Is With $100 Million For Echo And Voice Developers.
Amazon’s fuller ambitions for the Echo and its Alexa cloud-based voice software have become a little clearer. Amazon’s Echo, a connected device that combines the abilities of Siri and a bluetooth speaker in a 9.25-inch tall cylinder, is now available for anyone to buy if they have $179.99.The Echo – Amazon’s new technological magic box (well, more a cylinder) – is now publicly available after only previously being offered to a limited number of customers who applied to purchase it.On Thursday, the Seattle web retailer announced three initiatives to support its Alexa voice service and accompanying wireless personal assistant, Amazon Echo, including a software development kit and a $100 million fund to back engineers focused on building experiences around human speech.Amazon has provided a strong answer to a desire I expressed only yesterday for broader software and hardware support for Alexa, its virtual assistant, and Echo, the speaker hardware that is the first platform wherein Alexa can be found.
The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) APIs will let developers “integrate existing Web services with Alexa or, in just a few hours, they can build entirely new experiences designed around voice,” Amazon said. “[W]e’re making the Alexa Skills Kit available to any developer, maker, or general hobbyist that wants to invent on behalf of customers, creating new skills and capabilities,” said Greg Hart, vice president of Amazon Echo and Alexa Voice Services. The company announced Thursday that it is opening up the system to developers, so that anyone can design their own programs to work with the sleek cylindrical in-home assistant. The new gadget, which retails for $179, is an amalgamation of a home stereo and voice activated computer that comes preloaded with its own digital personal assistant. Amazon’s encouragement of engineers to develop for and around its voice service program comes two days after it made Echo, a wireless speaker that can respond to basic vocal commands, publicly available for purchase.
Alexa – the default name for the all-hearing program – seems poised to duke it out with Apple’s Siri in the race to be the most helpful disembodied voice blaring out from your devices. Though reviews for the product and its core Alexa voice technology have been mixed, Amazon is looking to speed up the adoption of its technology and allow for quicker improvements by opening up to developers. “Experiences designed around the human voice will fundamentally improve the way people use technology,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement. “Since introducing Amazon Echo, we’ve heard from developers, manufacturers, and start-ups of all sizes who want to innovate with this new technology.
So I’m testing out its artificial intelligence the best way my mushy human brain knows how: by slinging as many different commands and questions its way as I can. (The speaker, which is available for preorder now, ships next month.) All things considered, the Echo is remarkably smart. I’ve owned the Amazon Echo since December, and was in the first wave of people who were invited to purchase the product at a special $99 rate for Amazon Prime members. Since Echo was introduced last November, Amazon has been adding to its capabilities, including giving it ability to control other connected devices and give updates on your morning commute, as well as play music through a variety of streaming services or Bluetooth connection your smartphone. With the Alexa Fund, we want to empower people to explore the boundaries of voice technology.” While voice-based technology has already been a key feature in many electronic devices, there is room for improvement. Just as you can tell your Echo speaker to play rock music, or ask it how tall Mount Everest is, developers can embed Alexa into products like a Wi-Fi alarm clock, a car, a movie ticket machine, or a TV to allow consumers to interact with it.
That means they could make custom commands for smart appliances such as thermostats and sprinklers, or custom programs that work with Web sites so you can get news updates fed to your Echo. Sure, its A.I. has its limitations—even more so than Siri or Google Now, since those services are designed to do so much more than the Echo ever will.
Users complain all too often that Siri, Apple’s mobile-based vocal assistant, is not able to act beyond basic requests and often lacks the ability to comprehend the nuances of language and speech. Google and Microsoft have their own personal assistants in Google Now and Cortana, respectively, while there are a number of startups like Hound that are also looking to solve the speech problem.
The one sore spot with my Echo use thus far has been its limitations in terms of third-party integrations, something abated only in part by IFTTT recipes. It also has noise-filtering built in, so its possible to hold a conversation with Echo even while it plays music. “If Alexa were a human assistant, you’d fire her, if not have her committed,” writes Farhad Manjoo for the The New York Times. ” ‘Sorry I didn’t understand the question I heard’ is her favorite response, though honestly she doesn’t really sound very sorry.” While the Alexa’s technology still has a long way to go before she can become your personal concierge, she does have some valuable uses, Mr. We’re eager to see what they come up with.” Participants will receive more than just some extra cash: Amazon will help move them from concept to consumer, offering hands-on development support, placement at Amazon showcase events, and more. It’s free to use, and Amazon says that hobbyist programmers could do things like enable Alexa to retrieve the posted lunch menu at their child’s school with a simple voice command with a trivial amount of work.
People in the house can ask it questions, ask it to read books from Audible, ask for sports scores, set timers and even get it to tell terrible jokes. So that means you could build a bedside alarm clock/iPhone charging station that can also listen for and interpret Alexa voice commands, or create a vending machine that understands and is able to serve products according to customer requests.
Measuring 9.25 inches tall, Echo has seven microphones and uses far-field voice-recognition technology, so it can hear you even when music is playing. Those moves set Amazon up a little more solidly as a competitor to Apple and Google, which have also laid out ambitions to create hubs for the smart homes of the future.
But beyond that—and presumably a few other Easter eggs I have yet to uncover—Alexa’s vocabulary is limited to the Echo’s relatively narrow scope of functionality: playing music and podcasts, setting alarms, reciting a weather forecast, querying the web for basic trivia and math and shopping on Amazon. It also is linked to Amazon Prime Music, which means it acts as a credible speaker that will play any music that’s available in your personal Amazon music library or the free music available for Prime members. Echo represents the most recent major hardware incursion by Amazon since the less-than-successful rollout of company’s Fire smartphone, which was beset by low sales and low developer interest. But the promise of a product like the Echo goes beyond what it does out of the box: As developers start digging into its SDK, this thing is set to get a lot smarter and more useful. The speaker itself has only two buttons—one that manually activates Alexa, and another that mutes the Echo’s seven always-on microphones—with a ring around the top of its cylindrical body, doubling as a camouflaged volume knob.
The light gets concentrated in lighter hues along the part of the edge that’s closest to you, indicating that the Echo knows where your voice is coming from. Instead of packing an array of buttons and knobs onto the Echo, Amazon offloads the user interface to two places: its built-in voice control and the Echo app for smartphones and tablets, which lets you take control of the device using more familiar, visual interface paradigms, should you ever get tired of barking orders at an inanimate object.
Because as solid as its voice-recognition technology is, the Echo’s designers realized that people don’t want to use voice control as the only means of input. It’s one thing to say “Alexa, play Madonna.” It’s another to say “Alexa, turn it down” and then repeatedly shout “Alexa, skip!” across the room when the playlist isn’t going your way, followed by “Alexa, play Beyonce instead,” and so on. Pack all the features and gee-whiz technology into a product you want: The true test of its mass-market appeal will always be how easy it is to unpack, configure, and use. This includes physical releases that support Amazon’s AutoRip feature, which will automatically give you a free digital version of an album you purchase on vinyl or CD. Delightfully enough, digital versions of Wu-Tang Clan’s 36 Chambers and Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker I bought on vinyl from Amazon two years ago were both waiting there for me in a library of digital music I didn’t even realize I had.
It doesn’t seem to have a hard time with my eight-year-old daughter’s voice, unlike some voice recognition applications that freeze up when kids talk. The Echo does have support for Pandora and TuneIn, which means you can ask Alexa to play your favorite artist or song-based Internet radio stations or pull up popular podcasts. We’re not talking Sonos-level quality here, but it sounds as good as most small-to-medium sized Bluetooth speakers, with pretty solid bass response (although it would be nice to be able to adjust the bass). I linked the Echo to my Philips Hue connected lights and a lamp that is plugged into a Belkin WeMo switch, so all I have to do is say, “Alexa, turn off living room lights,” and they go off.
So I can buy Taylor Swift’s latest album just by telling Alexa to purchase it. (I have my Echo set to demand a security code, but you don’t have to enable this.) I can also re-order products that I’ve previously purchased on Amazon via a voice command. And by stationing itself in the home and linking to other products, it can gather a trove of user data that it can use to make recommendations and understand consumer behavior. So it might know my daughter has a love affair with Tommy Tutone and Taylor Swift while my husband is in charge of ordering replacement doggie waste bags.
Since I usually read on a Kindle or the Kindle app before bed, Amazon can effectively track me from eight in the evening through 11 at night because I’m watching movies on its Prime Video service while adding items to my To-Do list and checking on my next day’s appointments on the Echo. When it’s time to turn in, I tell it to turn off my lights and then my Kindle connects to Amazon’s cloud while I read a book that Amazon knows I’m reading. I haven’t seen my recommendations change drastically or experienced any offers yet via the Echo, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually happen in some subtle fashion.