“Now, with a program called Amazon Lex, the company is letting developers take the core of the technology to integrate it into their own offerings…”
Amazon is further expanding third party access to its voice interaction technology in a bid to secure its dominance of this rapidly rising field of AI, reports Reuters.
The company had opened up its popular Alexa platform considerably last summer when it launched the Alexa Skills Kit, allowing third party developers to create new Alexa functionality with their own products and services. Now, with a program called Amazon Lex, the company is letting developers take the core of the technology to integrate it into their own offerings, allowing them to take advantage of Alexa technology without having to integrate Amazon’s Alexa brand.
There’s a catch, of course. It’s a cloud service, and Amazon is charging developers by volume of processing requests. Nevertheless, many are likely keen to take advantage as voice interaction rises to become a primary user interface of phones and other smart devices.
That offers a further advantage to Amazon, as the company will be able to be able to use these processing requests to further train the Alexa technology, enhancing it with an infusion of big data. As a recent MIT Technology Review report noted, Amazon already has a considerable advantage in this field over rivals like Google and Apple in the form of data from the real-world use of its Alexa AI assistant. Now, that trove of data is poised to grow much larger.
Source: Reuters
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