Amazon Echo App Platform Offers Tremendous Opportunity for Business

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Technology is advancing at incredible speeds with the introduction of devices previously deemed unimaginable. Only a couple decades ago, virtual reality and voice-command devices were solely present in science fiction movies and books.

Today, many of the sci-fi innovations of the past have become a reality.

Amazon, with the introduction of Amazon Echo and the Alexa Skills Kit, is empowering enterprises and startups to deliver a new breed of voice-powered app introducing consumers to a new category of brand experience. The capabilities of Echo, as a platform, is beyond the scope of others. While there are other companies offering artificial intelligence powered assistants, such as Apple with Siri, Google with Google Now, and Microsoft with Cortana, Amazon is the first to open up Echo for others to build what it calls Skills with the Alexa Skills Kit.


Alexa Skills and How They Work

Amazon Echo has two types of skills: a set of pre-built skills and third-party skills powered by services that add new capabilities to Alexa. Examples of pre-built Alexa skills include the ability to listen to music, answer general knowledge questions, provide weather forecast information, set an alarm and timer, and query Wikipedia.

The Alexa Skills Kit lets companies build third-party services to add new capabilities to Alexa. Customers can access these new abilities by asking Alexa questions or making requests.

According to Amazon’s guide, Getting Started with the Alexa Skills Kit, “When a user asks Alexa a question or tells Alexa to do something, that request is sent to the Alexa service in the cloud. The Alexa service determines what the user is trying to do, routes the request to the specific cloud-based service that provides the logic, and waits for a response. The service can send back text that Alexa converts to speech to say back to the user. The service can also present graphical cards to users through the Amazon Alexa App, the companion app available for Fire OS, Android, iOS, and desktop web browsers.”

Said another way, Alexa takes in and routes requests from users to a third-party app that processes the user request, sending an output back to Alexa for relay back to the user. As an illustrative example, let’s take a movie buff who wants to find out the top rated movies. They may say, “Alexa, can you tell me the top box office movies with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 80% or higher?” Alexa will pass the question to the Rotten Tomatoes app, which processes the request and provides Alexa back the answer (the movies), that Alexa will relay back to the user. Let’s extend the example to illustrate the level of utility that can be built by combining the APIs of two services. By adding in Fandango, Alexa could, additional to the movies that fit into the requested ratings category, respond back to the user with context about what theater the movies are playing at along with showtimes, and ask the user if they want to buy tickets.

The Opportunity of Alexa as a Platform

Is now the right time to invest in developing a customer experience for Echo? The most important determinant of the opportunity of Echo as a platform to reach consumers is in whether Echo has the customer adoption trajectory to reach a critical mass consumers. We did some research into this and the data looks very promising.

While we could not find exact sales figures for the Echo, our investigation shows that Echo is currently the third-best-selling electronics device at Amazon, behind the Amazon Fire TV stick and its $50 Fire tablet. Over the 2015 Holiday Season, when Amazon offered a $30 discount on Black Friday, Echo was the number 1 best seller across all products on Amazon that cost more than $100, according to the company.

Out of the 31,500 reviews for Echo listed on Amazon, Echo has a five star (of five possible stars) rating from more than two-thirds of all reviews, and just 6% rating it one or two stars. In general, the vast majority of people love the device, while a few are frustrated by its limitations. One lengthy review, “The Echo has become the most used appliance in our home,” has been upvoted more than 11,000 times and has 295 comments. Its top complaint is that the Echo isn’t portable, which Amazon has addressed with the introduction of the Dot and Tap to the Echo family.

Unrelated to customer adoption, it is important to note that Amazon is opening up the core Alexa Voice Service (AVS) engine to third-parties, empowering enterprises and startups bringing to market connected products with a microphone and a speaker to leverage AVS to add voice-powered experiences to connected devices without having to make the large investment of building their own artificial intelligence powered assistants. Product makers can incorporate Alexa to deliver their own voice-powered experiences without having to deal with the complexities of voice recognition or Natural Language Understanding. Using AVS, a company can add Alexa to a device in just a few hours. This is a significant as it not only helps companies to focus on their core value proposition, but it also helps Amazon expand its Alexa footprint outside of its Echo product family, furthering the vision for Alexa as a platform.    

Early Adopters Building an Ecosystem

Amazon Echo with 3rd Party AppsDozens of prominent companies have extended their brand into the home by enabling their customers to interact with their services through Echo and Alexa skills voice powered brand experiences. Alexa, with its new third-party built skills, can now enable users to order a ride from Uber, ask for an account balance from Capital One, ask to have Philips’ lights turned on, ask to have Domino’s pizza delivered, and much more.

As Amazon Echo brings a new opportunity for enterprise and startups to reach their target audience and potential customers, in the homes of users around the world, we can imagine a future where companies start to build much more complex customer experiences on top of Echo. Almost any digital experience, where a user has to scroll and click, can be executed elegantly via a voice powered experience.


Join the other forward leaning companies that are paving the way in leveraging artificial intelligence powered assistants to deliver a new breed of brand experiences to your customers with Amazon Echo and Alexa skills. Contact us to discuss how we can help you leverage the Alexa Skills Kit to accelerate your business.

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