Fast Forward: Everything Brands Should Know From Amazon’s 2017 AWS re:Invent
New Alexa capabilities; Advanced cloud AI services, AR/VR creation tools; and more from last week’s AWS re:Invent event
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Last week, Amazon held sixth annual AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to unveil its latest updates and new services. As it is geared towards developers using AWS (Amazon Web Services — Amazon’s subsidiary for cloud computing services), the event focuses on backend cloud services and developer tools and is light on consumer-facing products and services. Nevertheless, among the long list of new tools and services that Amazon introduced, a couple of them caught our eye due to their implications for brand marketing. Our very own senior associate of partnership, Scott Elchison, attended the week-long event and brought back some valuable first-hand insights.
What Amazon Announced
Amazon Wants “Alexa Everywhere”
With Echo products dominating the U.S. smart speaker market, Alexa is the current media darling of Amazon’s digital services, and Amazon understandably wants to push its leading lady “everywhere” — both geographically and figuratively. In terms of geographical expansion, Amazon announced it is committing another $100 million to its Alexa Fund to bring Alexa to more international markets, starting with Australia and New Zealand in early 2018.
On the figurative side, Amazon is breaking new grounds with Alexa for Business, which aims to bring voice command into the workplace by integrating it with enterprise software such as Exchange, RingCentral, and Salesforce to help improve operational efficiency. Amazon is also expanding Alexa’s support for gaming experiences, enabling developers to create more sophisticated voice game with a Gadgets Skill API scheduled for release early next year. The API will allow developers to incorporate add-on gadgets such as the Echo Button into their voice gaming experience. Alexa is already available on some Fire TV streaming devices, and it now extends voice control to Hulu, Bravo, Showtime, and some other video apps to allow for deeper integrations.
Preparing Alexa to be capable everywhere, Amazon also announced some major functionality updates. Developers can now create notifications for their Alexa skills, using audio and light cues as a way to get user’s attention. It is important to note that at the moment Amazon does not allow Alexa notifications to be used for promotional purposes, but rather encourages developers to use them to provide timely updates and prompts for users. Alexa is also getting smarter, thanks to backend updates focused on deeper contextual learning, which will allow Alexa to understand conversational contexts, differentiate its answers based on device (such as providing visual components on Echo Show), and identify different users by voice to offer personalized responses.
Also noteworthy is the integration of Amazon Pay into Alexa, allowing not only in-skill purchases for additional digital content, but also completing voice orders on third-party skills using stored payment information, The integration will start with the aforementioned gaming experiences and also covers select third-party skills in the categories of donations, restaurants, and event ticketing. T.G.I.Fridays is the first restaurant to incorporate Amazon Pay into its Alexa skill to let users order takeout and pay with their Amazon account. it is unclear when exactly Amazon plans to expand it to other skills, although a developer preview indicated that Amazon Pay-enabled skills will expand to more categories in 2018.
AWS Gets Major AI Boosts
The main portion of the re:Invent event is devoted to updates of Amazon Web Services (AWS), especially in regards to new AI-powered cloud services. The set of new cloud-based machine learning tools that Amazon introduced includes Rekognition for real-time image and video analysis, Comprehend, which promises to analyze text for sentiment, people, places, and more, Translate, a “fast and affordable” neural machine translation service, as well as Transcribe, which automatically creates text files from audio recordings and recognizes different speakers. Amazon’s developer preview did not indicate when these new machine learning tools will become available other than “coming soon.”
As for the data collection and analytics side of cloud AI, Amazon unveiled SageMaker, a new AWS tool for incorporating machine learning into new applications. It features prebuilt algorithms and notebooks for common issues, one-click training within a defined data cluster as well as deployment with a/b testing, promising overall expedited processes for developers and data scientists.
AWS IoT also got some love with two new services aimed to enhance IoT management and security on AWS. The first, AWS IoT Device Management, let users manage fleets of IoT devices including onboarding, organization, monitoring and remote management all in one place. The second is AWS IoT Device Defender, which is designed for continuous auditing, real-time monitoring, and fast investigation and mitigation of IoT devices at scale.
Besides all the software updates, AWS also surprised the crowd with a deep learning-enabled video camera named AWS DeepLens. Intended for assisting developers to test and train their computer vision programs, it is a fully programmable video camera that comes with its own tutorials, code, and pre-trained models designed to give AWS developers a helping eye.
Strong Push Into Video Services
Last but not the least, this AWS re:Invent also brought forward some solid updates for Amazon’s cloud-based video services. The new AWS Media Services promise users flexible, on-demand access broadcast infrastructure without having to do any of the heavy lifting of managing video infrastructure. It comes with several useful video management tools, such as MediaLive for encoding live video, MediaConvert for compressing video files for faster delivery, and MediaStore which offers high-performance storage for live and on-demand video optimized for low latency. One notable standout among the bunch is MediaTailor, which aims to help deliver personalized and monetized video content. It uses server-side ad insertion to serve unique ads to the viewers and promises improved ad tracking.
Amazon also plans to introduce customer service videos as part of its broader push into the online video market. Product review videos have been a growing trend for the past few years that exerts an increasingly strong influence on online shopping, and Amazon has been trying to tap into this trend for a while. In October, Amazon was awarded a patent for “content-based price reductions and incentives,” which could be used for giving users a discount for watching a product demo video or even traditional ads.
User-Friendly Platform For AR/VR Creation
Beyond voice interface, Amazon also jumped into augmented and virtual reality with the debut of Sumerian, a web-based application for developing immersive 3D experiences. As a platform-agnostic developer tool, Sumerian can create VR and AR content that can run across a number of popular hardware such as HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, and iOS devices with ARKit, and it will soon also come to Android devices that support ARCore. The 3D experience creation tool is user-friendly to those who lack expertise in programming or 3D graphics design, featuring a “drag-and-drop” style interface and an easy way to create animated 3D characters called Hosts to guide users through the immersive experiences.
What Brands Need To Do
Overall, this AWS re:Invent event perfectly encapsulated the major trends in technology today and pointed to some major areas in which Amazon is investing heavily. As Amazon grows increasingly prominent and casts looming shadows on many industries, brands need to start devising countering strategies today to keep up with the times.
Improve Your Voice Experience As Alexa Grows
Amazon takes its mission statement of “Alexa Everywhere” seriously, and so should you. The expansion of Alexa into workplaces and more international markets will allow brands to reach a wider range of consumers in new contexts, and how to configure and design your voice experiences against various cultures and settings will be something that brands will have to figure out. As Alexa’s user base start to diversify, both culturally and contextually, so will the use case of the skills.
The addition of notifications allows brands to create more engaging voice experiences by attracting user’s attention for time-sensitive tasks and re-engagement. User retention has long been a major pain point for Alexa skills, as recent statistics from VoiceLabs indicates 94% of Alexa users would abandon a third-party skill within a week of activation. While notifications and more personalized responses should be able to help increase user retention, it ultimately comes down to the design of the voice experiences and how habit-forming they are structured to be.
In addition, entertainment and restaurant brands need to take advantage of the Amazon Pay integration to turn their Alexa skills into a sales touch point. Allowing customers to unlock additional content, purchase movie tickets, or order food deliveries without having to go through the trouble of creating an account and filling out the payment information would be a huge plus for streamlining the user experience of your Alexa skill.
Supercharge Your Business With Cloud AI
The mushrooming machine learning services on cloud services in recent years provide a tremendous opportunity for brands to upgrade the backend of their websites and apps with AI-driven solutions, and the new tools that Amazon announced last week is no exception. A recent survey conducted by Salesforce Research found that 51% of marketing leaders are already using AI, with more than a quarter planning to pilot it in the next two years. For brands that are still wondering how to incorporate machine learning and AI solutions into your business, the new tools on AWS could be a good place to start, especially if your business is already using AWS.
For example, Amazon Transcribe can automatically transcribe audio into text, making it a useful tool for logging customer feedback collected via phone calls or voice experiences, and cataloging branded audio assets. Similarly, Comprehend can sort through image and visual assets that brands collected and make sure they are properly categorized for targeted use. Amazon Translate can be a great tool for brands serving a multicultural audience. For example, Hotels.com is currently using this system to power automated translations for the customer reviews for the site’s listings around the world and improve customer experience via localization.
For example, CPG brands can especially benefit from cloud-based AI solutions by leveraging them to deliver a more seamless customer experience. For example, tools like Amazon Rekognition can help CPG brands scan large amount of user-generated social media images featuring your products, analyze those unstructured visual data, and help identify key trends and behavioral insights among your key demographics.
Get Started On Building Immersive Experiences Today
The debut of Amazon Sumerian offers brands yet another platform to build AR/VR experiences, and while it may not be as powerful or sophisticated compared to the likes of Microsoft’s Mixed Reality developer platform or Apple’s ARKit, it is an easy-to-use beginner tool that brands can test the waters with, and its platform-agnostic nature makes it a good fit for brands that want to maximize the availability of their immersive experiences without too much customization. Ultimately, the choice of creation platform has to be aligned with the brand’s campaign objectives and overarching AR/VR strategies.
Another thing brands need to heed when developing AR/VR experiences today is to remember the differing degree of immersion between the two and experiences of various degrees of immersiveness to serve different purposes and customer needs. For instance, healthcare and fitness brands have early adopter of VR technology for training and therapeutic purposes. But with AR, they have gained another visualization tool for educating patients and customers and guide them to stay healthy.
Want To Learn More?
As we endeavor to make Fast Forward a valuable and actionable resource, please feel free to reach out to us with any feedback. If you’d like to have a customized deep dive into how your brand can leverage these new opportunities that Amazon unleashed with their latest updates, please reach out to our Director of Client Relationship Ben Hone (ben@ipglab.com) to start a conversation.
