By Laura Stevens
Amazon.com Inc. boasts that Alexa, its artificial-intelligence
assistant, can perform more than 50,000 skills.
The problem is, most people still use it mainly to turn on the
lights, play music or time the pasta.
The online retail giant, battling competitors including Alphabet
Inc.'s Google for voice-assistant supremacy, is accelerating
efforts to make Alexa more useful, from enhancing its
conversational chops to offering outside developers financial
incentives to make better Alexa-compatible voice applications,
which Amazon calls skills.
Amazon last month expanded the capability of Alexa developers to
allow them to charge users for purchases within skills, such as
premium content from a media service, or hints or special powers in
a game.
The goal is to incentivize developers to make better skills and
ultimately make Alexa a more valuable platform, Amazon says, much
as Apple Inc. did with the App Store.
"The phenomenon is exactly what we saw with the App Store for
the iPhone, " said Ahmed Bouzid, former Alexa head of product and
now chief executive of Witlingo, which builds tools to help create
and launch voice applications for Alexa and Google platforms. It's
"pure economics and motivation to build great skills that people
will actually pay more for."
Amazon has sold an estimated 47 million-plus devices in the Echo
family since its launch in late 2014, giving it a roughly 51% share
of the smart-speaker market, according to Loup Ventures. Device
prices currently range from $40 for a hockey puck-size Dot to $230
for its latest screened version. Last month, Amazon unveiled 15 new
and updated devices in the family, including an amplifier and an
Alexa-enabled microwave oven.
Some Echo customers, like 59-year-old Suzanne Plunkett of
Chicago, feel they aren't getting the value they'd hoped for. She
said since receiving her Echo as a Christmas gift in 2016, she has
used it just a few times, "twice to ask it for a joke." One reason
she hasn't taken time to figure it out, she said, is she can
already just look at a clock or switch on a light. "It just seemed
like a gimmick to me," she added.
Part of Amazon's response has been to enhance Alexa's ability to
carry on human-like conversations. Now it responds to a string of
commands all on the same topic or offers a hunch, such as that
someone might want to turn the lights off when they go to bed.
Rohit Prasad, Alexa's head scientist, said Amazon has made
thousands of skills searchable. When a consumer asks how to get a
stain out of a shirt, Alexa will narrow down skills to offer,
evaluate which has the best answer and use that one to respond --
in this case, with a tool from Good Housekeeping that offers
stain-removal tips and instructions.
"I think we're getting to a point where customers are saying,
'I'm sure Alexa can do a lot more things than I'm aware of,' " said
Tom Taylor, senior vice president of Amazon Alexa.
The subscriptions and other purchases within skills that Amazon
is now allowing typically cost from 99 cents to $1.99, with
discounts for Prime members. They follow Amazon's move last year to
reward developers with payments based on downloads and usage.
The incentives are aimed at getting companies and people like
Gal Shenar, a Boston-based software developer, to develop stronger
Alexa skills that improve the quality of its app store.
Mr. Shenar created a game for Alexa users called "Escape the
Room." Users get an imagined situation, like a car fully submerged
in water, and use verbal commands to explore their surroundings,
find tools and try to escape. He has added hints that are available
for purchase -- and users, who number in the hundreds of thousands,
have steadily started to purchase them.
Still, Mr. Shenar said, while "a lot of the potential profits
are unlocked" in Apple's App Store, "that's not yet really possible
with Alexa." Monetizing aspects of creating things for Alexa is
"going to make a big difference in how companies approach building
skills for the platform," he predicts.
Michele Audish, age 20, until recently used her family's Echo
only for music or turning on the lights, but she recently asked
Alexa about a giant box she saw at the nearby Los Angeles Grove
shopping complex. It turned out to be a "Jurassic World"
advertisement. Afterward, Alexa pitched her on playing a
Jurassic-themed choose-your-own-adventure game. She paid the $1.99
and played for about an hour, answering yes-and-no questions to try
to help save the dinosaurs.
"I had never played a game on it," she said, adding she enjoyed
the experience. "I didn't even know that was a thing you could
do."
Write to Laura Stevens at laura.stevens@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 20, 2018 11:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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