Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service Available To Developers

As mentioned by a press release, AVS will be available in developer preview for any device with a microphone, speaker and Internet connection.

You can add the Roku media player to the list of devices that can be bossed about by the Amazon Echo and its built-in AI: Alexa.

One of the things that impressed me the most about the Amazon Echo was Alexa, the brains behind the smart speaker that rivals Siri in terms of intelligent assistance and connectedness.

AVS is essentially a collections of tools, support documents, APIs and sample code to get you started on integrating the voice assistant into your software, or even a device of your own. “Alexa includes access to information, music, audiobooks, news, weather, traffic and more, including any custom skills you create using the Alexa Skills Kit to differentiate your device”, reads Amazon’s description. The Alexa sends the voice command to the AWS Lambda service, which processes it, sends the command to the node.js service, which finally sends the command to the Roku. Staples also sells other Amazon hardware like the the Fire TV, the Fire TV stick, the Fire TV game controller, and several Kindle tablets on its website.

“Experiences designed around the human voice will fundamentally improve the way people use technology“. Amazon highlights frictionless interfaces, scalability and easy integration as reasons to start experimenting with the platform. With the Alexa Fund, we want to empower people to explore the boundaries of voice technology.

Like we said, Amazon Echo is cool, but its feature set is also pretty limited.