ALEXA, the Technology for all Voices!

“Technology has brought us to a point at which hundreds of millions if not billions of people have a voice, each voice can be heard now!” said Jeff Pulver, an American Entrepreneur.

Amazon Inc. launched an Artificial-Intelligence based personal virtual assistant known as Amazon Alexa on November 6, 2014. It was first developed for Amazon Echo smart speakers.

Amazon developers chose to name the virtual assistant Alexa because it has a hard consonant with the alphabet X, which helps it to be recognized with higher precision.

Based on AI, Alexa is capable of doing a lot more than just interacting with people, for example creating a to-do list, setting up alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, providing weather forecasts, and many other real-time pieces of information like sports, news, and traffic update.

Amazon hasn’t limited Alexa to only a certain amount of tasks and has given people the advantage of extending Alexa’s capabilities with the help of ‘Alexa Skills’. Alexa Skills are third party voice applications that can be found on Alexa Skills Store just like android and ios applications found on google and apple play stores.

Few months after the launch of Alexa, the Home Automation System feature for Alexa was also launched. With this feature, the user was able to control the lightings of their houses, the security systems, and even control the water supply of their kitchen, like asking Alexa to pour a glass of water!!! These types of innovations helped developers by letting them create and customize their own Smart Home Skills.

Alexa pour water.mp4

Alexa devices let its users launch or trigger Alexa in the simplest way possible, which is just to say the wake-up word “Alexa” loud enough to reach the speakers of the Alexa devices. Communications with Alexa are currently in English, Hindi, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese.

Till date, Amazon has launched more than 10 different types of devices which are enabled with Alexa:-

1. Amazon Echo,
2. Amazon Echo Dot,
3. Amazon Echo Plus,
4. Amazon Echo Input portable smart speaker,
5. Amazon Echo Show,
6. Amazon Echo Studio,
7. Amazon Echo Flex- Plug-in,
8. Amazon Echo Sub,
9. Amazon Echo Link,
10. Amazon Echo Buds,
11. Amazon Echo Loop,
12. Amazon Echo Frames, etc.

Skills Development:-

Amazon created a developer atmosphere for third-party vendors allowing them to use Alexa Skills Kit for Skills development. Alexa developers console resides inside Amazon Web Services’ Alexa Skills Kit.

The Kit has two options, either to develop the skill from scratch or build the skill using the templates provided by Alexa. For skills consisting of a large amount of data and real-time/live pieces of information, they can be connected with several APIs. Almost all skills run code entirely in the cloud by using Amazon’s AWS Lambda services.

With an increasing number of third-party vendors, Amazon launched Alexa Skill Blueprints which was a way to create own personal skills and get responses in minutes.

Future of Alexa and Voice Technology:-

Currently, Alexa and its devices are ruling the Voice Industry with a more superior ecosystem. Amazon’s Alexa team is continuously working to improve and upgrade the intelligence of Alexa.

The AI assistant shows a significant number of updates almost every year, last year being the most important one with an announcement of the ‘memory’ feature which enables Alexa to remember important dates, as well as ‘context carry over’, which means you can ask one question followed by another.

Right now there is a patent under development that will allow Alexa to respond to commands and questions without the wake-up word ‘Alexa’. That means you could say “turn lights on Alexa” rather than saying “Alexa” before the command.

Don Skuler, the CEO and Co-Founder of Intuition Robotics once said, “Switching from traditional screen interfaces to voice interfaces is a logical move”. This clearly shows that the future of the Robotics Industry is about to see a major divergence from on-screen display output to voice output.

Alexa officials think that the only way to make Alexa smart assistant smart is to give it a body and eyes to let it explore the world and let it learn by itself. With this, it’s clearly visible that the future of Alexa in the coming years is about to take a high jump of Intellectual and Physical development.