Amazon has popularized voice assistants by providing home automation services, which have been made possible by skills provided by third-party developers. The company separated the voice-response software, Alexa Voice Service, and it has since been acting as a primary source of expansion across to a multitude of devices. And now Amazon is going international, with the roll out of AVS across U.K and Germany. It will now enable seamless voice interaction in Deutsch and British English.
Alexa Voice Service (AVS) was initially launched in the U.S. back in 2015. It was debuted with the aim of providing hardware manufacturers easy access to the services of its voice-assistant Alexa. It also makes the speech recognition and natural language processing technology that powers the development of skills to these individuals. Talking about the extension of services, the official blog post reads,
AVS localization provides you with language and region-specific services to expand your audience and delight new customers. With a few lines of code, you can upgrade any product with Alexa to access localized languages and skills in the UK, Germany, and U.S.
This means that users in these three markets, who own any connected device powered by the Alexa Voice Service, can now use it with the complete range of Alexa skills available in the market. They will also be able to use any of the three different languages to set commands, it doesn’t depend on the market. But, there are several skills that are market specific and won’t be accessible across all regions. This includes iHeart Radio and Kindle in the U.S and Control4’s home automation software 4Sight in the U.K.
Amazon initially debuted its voice assistant Alexa towards the end of 2014, but it was made popular by its two smart home devices Echo Dot and Echo. It provided users with a home speaker with voice interaction, weather & traffic info, playing audiobooks, streaming podcasts and setting to-do lists or alarms. The said services have, however, now been extended far beyond the circular devices.
The said services have, however, now been extended far beyond the circular devices. Alexa integrations can be found in refrigerators, smart home robots, TVs, smart assistants, speakers, neck buds, cameras and much more. This year’s CES was the prime example to witness the robust growth of Alexa Voice Service in the last few months since it was decoupled from the developer suite. It was a massive hit and Google Assistant is now planning to play catch by most likely extending its support to OEMs in coming months.
