Amazon said its Alexa artificial intelligence assistant has reached 1,000 skills created by third party developers. Several of the more notable additions to Alexa’s selection of skills include those from Capital One, Domino’s, Fitbit, KAYAK, SmartThings, and Uber. “We had the idea to give our customers the option to order an Uber with their voice and the Alexa Skills Kit made it easy with open, cloud-based APIs that worked seamlessly with our Uber API”. In January of this year, Alexa’s skills section had only about 130 apps. With the Vivint smart-home system and one of Amazon’s Echo devices, you can ask Alexa to set your thermostat, lock your doors, dim your lights, close your garage door, and more. Alexa is also the surprise hit from Amazon that has everyone from Google to Apple playing catch up.
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With all the major tech players now having smart digital assistant platforms of their own, third-party integrations are going to be one of the ways that users can distinguish between them – it’s like the app store wars all over again. The company’s officials said that Amazon provided them with an intuitive and efficient method for developing their app.
Alexa powers the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Fire TV and Amazon Tap.
Alexa Director, Rob Pulcani, also mentioned that this “tens of thousands of developers” are learning more about the service and working to develop it even more. “We’re excited about the 1,000 skills that are already available, and can’t wait to see what developers create with the next ten thousand”. Alexa doesn’t forget and the longer you own the speaker, the more useful the Alexa software becomes. You can even interact with her by using a Voice Remote which connects to the device via Bluetooth and lets Alexa hear you even if there’s a rock concert taking place in the house.
Powered by Google’s Android OS, Core can perform a range of tasks, such as calculating users’ location and distance traveled, create voice notes, send messages, and more.
But the interest for internet-connected homes has also spurred interest in the developer world in the form of add-ons dubbed “skills”. The reason behind this is the search-giants immensely vast database, which is backing its recently launched smart speaker, Google Home; the Echo Competitor.
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In the press release that accompanied the announcement of the 1,000 skills milestone, a plethora of companies said how easy it was to build tools with the Alexa Skills Kit.
