What Happened
Amazon has integrated Alexa into the iOS version of its main app, allowing iPhone and iPad users to interact with the popular voice assistant right on their mobile devices. IOS users can tap a microphone icon in the Amazon app to use Alexa to shop on Amazon.com by voice, play music and audiobooks, asking Alexa questions, checking the news, and accessing the 10,000 and counting Alexa skills, including the one we made for getting Miller Lite delivered to your door using Drizzly.
The move by Amazon makes Alexa available for a much wider audience who might not have Amazon Echo or Fire devices, expanding the reach and introduce more users to its ecosystem of Alexa-powered services and hardware products.This would help Amazon further conquer the digital assistant market and, in turn, give Amazon more conversational data to improve Alexa.
What Brands Need To Do
For brands, the expanded reach should make Alexa a more attractive platform to develop voice-based conversational experiences for. Earlier this week, Amazon announced it is applying promotional credits for developers that use Amazon Web Services for hosting Alexa skills, making it free for brands to build and host their Alexa skills.
According to a report from analytics firm VoiceLabs, about 33 million voice-first devices will be in circulation by the end of 2017. Therefore, It is up to brands to start working with developers to figure out their brand voice and incorporate conversational tools into their marketing efforts.
How We Can Help
The Lab has extensive experience in building Alexa Skills and chatbots to reach consumers on conversational interfaces. So much so that we’ve built a dedicated conversational practice called Dialogue. The “Miller Time” Alexa Skill we developed is a good example of how Dialogue can help brands build a conversational customer experience, supercharged by our stack of technology partners with best-in-class solutions and an insights engine that extracts business intelligence from conversational data.
If you’d like to learn more about how to effectively reach consumers on conversational interfaces, or to leverage the Lab’s expertise to take on related client opportunities within the IPG Mediabrands, please contact our Client Services Director Samantha Holland (samantha@ipglab.com) to schedule a visit to the Lab.
Source: Ars Technica
Header image is a promotional image courtesy of Amazon