For the overstretched small business owner, anything that helps them to perform their job more efficiently, or reach their customer more personally, is a welcome relief and Amazon believes its intelligent voice service Alexa can do just that.
Alexa is a cloud-based voice service and is the brain that powers Amazon’s Echo: a voice-controlled speaker that can perform tasks for the user such as answer questions, check the weather, manage their smart home, shop, or play music. It has unlimited potential in terms of the number of tasks it can perform because Amazon has made it possible for third parties to create their own ‘skills’ for Alexa.
Showcased at the Amazon Academy, the Alexa Skills Kit is a set of tools that companies can use to create skills without needing any knowledge or expertise in voice technologies. These tools are available for free and allow businesses to integrate their own service into Alexa, allowing SMEs to capitalise on new innovations typically only available to major multinational corporations with huge research and development budgets.
“It is an area we are super excited about and investing very heavily in,” says Amazon UK country manager Doug Gurr. “We have a vast number of small third party businesses who can create their own skills for it – who can get access and use voice in the way that delivers exciting new experiences for their customers.”
Online food ordering company Just Eat has created an Alexa skill that allows customers to reorder food or check on the status of their deliveries by voice. For example, a customer can just say “Alexa, ask Just Eat to reorder Dim Sum” and Alexa will automatically reorder your last meal.
“We have a product research team but you don’t need to have that to be able to create an Alexa skill in your business,” says Just Eat principal UX (user experience) designer Craig Pugsley.
Indeed, if a business has access to a developer, creating an Alexa skill “will be super straight forward”, according to Just Eat senior user interface engineer Andy May.
Part of the power of the Amazon Echo device lies in its advanced “far field” microphone technology. Each Echo has a built-in seven-mic array around the top, meaning it can pick up voice commands from across a room – even if people are talking or music is playing. All the user has to do is ‘wake’ the device by saying the magic word: Alexa.
Once awake Echo connects to Alexa in the cloud, and uses an advanced “natural language understanding” engine to determine what the user is asking for – and it’s staggeringly effective at interpreting the intent of voice commands.
Each skill has its own ‘invocation’, like “ask Uber” or “ask Just Eat”, which directs Alexa to connect to those services. Once Alexa understands what skill has been invoked it can then carry out any task that has been coded by the developer and companies can hook it up to their own services or systems to feed real-time information, like how far away your Uber is, into responses.
“We’ve created a self-service set of tools that anyone from a large corporation to a small business or even a hobbyist can use to expand the capabilities of Alexa,” says Amazon’s Kevin Sontgerath. “Third parties are really important in teaching Alexa new things, and we’re seeing new skills added by developers of all sizes.”
The artificial intelligence technology behind Alexa means the more it is used, the smarter it gets and the aim is for it to become increasingly conversational. Just Eat’s developers are confident that voice commands will be the next evolution in user interaction, following the move from point and click to touchscreen.
“As far as we are concerned natural language interaction is going to be the next interaction frontier,” says Pugsley. “We want to make sure we understand voice well enough that when it comes we can exploit it to the best of our ability.”
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