As promised, Amazon is taking steps to let anyone incorporate the voice assistant software used by the Amazon Echo into third-party hardware. This could let computers, TV boxes, smart speakers, or pretty much any device with a microphone, speaker, and internet connection respond to voice commands by using Amazon’s technology.

Amazon has launched a developer preview of the Amazon Voice Service to kick things off.

alexa voice service

Plenty of smartphones and tablets include support for voice-based search and controls thanks to Google Voice Search, Siri, Cortana, or similar software. But Amazon says the idea behind its Alexa Voice Service is to bring natural-language voice controls to other devices, so you don’t need to find and unlock your phone.

Theoretically the service could be integrated into phones and tablets, but it seems like Amazon envisions it working with standalone devices  like the Amazon Echo — which is the company’s own Blueooth speaker/microphone/assistant device.

The developer preview is aimed at “hobbyists and hardware makers” and includes tools, documentation, APIs, and code samples. Amazon says it should take developers just a few hours to add natural language speech recognition features to a device by tapping into the company’s cloud-based service.

Among other things, Alexa Voice Service can control media playback, add items to shopping lists or to-do lists, provide traffic or weather updates, stream news updates, tell you about upcoming appointments from Google Calendar, tell you jokes, or answer questions with information from Wikipedia or other web sites.

Support Liliputing

Liliputing's primary sources of revenue are advertising and affiliate links (if you click the "Shop" button at the top of the page and buy something on Amazon, for example, we'll get a small commission).

But there are several ways you can support the site directly even if you're using an ad blocker* and hate online shopping.

Contribute to our Patreon campaign

or...

Contribute via PayPal

* If you are using an ad blocker like uBlock Origin and seeing a pop-up message at the bottom of the screen, we have a guide that may help you disable it.

Subscribe to Liliputing via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 9,547 other subscribers