Alexa’s role as the platform for educational goods will push Amazon into Educational services
Two recent announcements by Amazon underscore their intent to be the platform for Educational goods. The first was their launch of TenMarks writing. Amazon acquired TenMarks in 2013, TenMarks encourages students to write by giving them various formats e.g. mobile messaging, or topics and then analyses their use of words and the text to give automated feedback. It’s a useful service but not in of itself a game changer.
Amazon’s second, more strategic move is with Alexa their digital assistant for the home. Amazon have enabled parental control on Alexa — parent’s give voice permission for their children to use Alexa third party games. Although a seemingly technical detail, the move is important. While Alexa already had thousands of third party games aimed at children, it was a legal grey area due to US laws on Child Data Protection. Nickelodeon and Sesame Street have immediately taken advantage of this to launch two children’s education games — a SpongeBob memory game and a hide and seek game. Alexa however is far more versatile than this and Amazon will be positioning it as the ‘Playstation’ of the home through which educational and recreational products can be used. Alexa they will hope (or its more more sophisticated descendent) can support AR and VR experiences. At a minimum Amazon willw ant users to purchase such games on Alexa and quite possibly use Alexa to run the game on a AR/VR device. That matters for education because it’ll blur the line of educational goods and educational services; such as when a VR lesson is downloaded, why not a VR courses, why not through Alexa?
Amazon evidently view education as a key growth market for the platform. Amazon Inspire has recently launched and while Open Educational Resources are unlikely to yield much profit (they are by definition free) it brings in people they can monetise elsewhere. Opening up Alexa is to children’s games is similar — using Alexa’s household ubiquity (~9% of US household already have it and growth is rapid) to bring Educational goods to families. Amazon’s bet will be that much of the future of Edtech market will be AI driven — blurring the line between goods and services — and making Alexa well placed to capture all the value of both — here and here
