Spreading Alexa and Amazon's Artificial Intelligence

Alexa, an intelligent voice assistant created by Amazon, has recently significantly expanded its capabilities and can now be used not only in proprietary devices from Amazon, such as Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Tap, etc., but also in devices from other manufacturers - automobiles Ford, Volkswagen and Hyundai, Huawei smartphones, LG smart home systems and many other devices.

More than two years have passed since the release of Echo. During this time, the company launched and significantly expanded the list of additional skills of Alexa Assistant: developers were provided with an updated API, with which the system can be trained in new skills - “Skills” in the terminology of Amazon. The number of such downloadable skills developed by third-party developers has grown to seven thousand.

In addition, Amazon introduced new services that use AI for such purposes as image recognition, translating text into natural speech and building complex dialogues with robots and helpers. These services are available to everyone on the AWS platform.

But first things first.
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With the help of the Alexa Skills Kit API and Alexa Voice Service updated in December, third-party developers can create their “Skills” - applications, thanks to which the owners of smart devices get a new level of interaction.

The technology giant itself, apparently, began to focus not on hardware, but on software: Echo's software foundation — Alexa's artificial intelligence — was made available for use by other companies.

And the examples were not long in coming: at CES 2017, which ran from January 5 to 9 in Las Vegas, Alexa from Amazon was the most popular technology. Thanks to the Amazon API, Lenovo introduced Smart Assistant Speaker, its version of Amazon Echo.



This clever speaker, according to the company, recognizes teams at a distance of up to 5 meters. The device received eight microphones, noise suppression technology, as well as an optional audio system from Harman Kardon. Lenovo estimates its product at $ 130, and the Harman Edition version at $ 180 (Amazon Echo costs $ 180).

At the same CES 2017, after the announced partnership with Ford, two other automakers announced cooperation with Amazon - Volkswagen and Hyundai. For example, the introduction of the Alexa service into new Volkswagen cars will allow users to gain access to its “skills” both from inside the car and from the outside. In addition, Volkswagen will connect Alexa with the Car-Net system, which was launched in 2013 and allows users to control speed, alert emergency services in the event of an accident or airbag deployment, and determine the location of the car in the parking lot. Alexa will also be able to report on the condition of the car, including the engine and lighting system, how wipers work, and how much fuel or oil in the car.



At the international exhibition were presented not only the device in the form of a column or announced partnerships with car manufacturers. For example, LG announced Alexa support in the InstaView smart fridge. All Alexa functions will be available in the fridge, and users will be able to order grocery delivery using voice commands. Belkin reported that users will be able to synchronize Wemo Dimmer and Wemo Mini switches with Alexa.

Whirlpool announced that since the beginning of 2017, many elements of smart home appliances can be controlled using Alexa: voice control capabilities will help users find out how much time is left on the oven timer, change the wash cycle, change refrigerator settings to turn the maximum cooling mode on or off.

But that's not all. Among other well-known vendors, Amazon points out a partnership with DISH Network, one of the largest players in the US pay-TV market. For those who are looking for a new TV, there are models from Westinghouse, Element and Seiki with the built-in Amazon Fire TV OS - thus, the TVs of these brands can also be controlled using artificial intelligence from Amazon.



One of the largest Chinese telecommunications companies, Huawei, unveiled an updated version of its Mate 9 smartphone for the US market. Alexa can also extend your control over vacuum cleaners: the Samsung POWERbot VR7000 will be controlled by Alexa.

From CES 2017, we’ll go back a couple of months ago to the same Las Vegas. On November 30, 2016, at the AWS re: Invent conference, Amazon announced new AI services. The company has been developing machine learning tools for several years and proudly (several thousand people work in the company) provided three services.

The first of the services is Rekognition, a tool for image recognition. The service allows you to add image analysis capabilities to the application, detecting objects, scenes and faces. Amazon Rekognition uses deep neural network models to recognize and mark thousands of objects and scenes.

According to Andy Jassy, ​​CEO of Amazon Web Services, the system can even determine the breed of dog that its competitors do not:



Prices for the use of this service start at one dollar per thousand images (the exact cost of the link ).

The second service is Amazon Polly, a tool for converting text into natural speech. Based on a large number of algorithms, this text-to-speech service allows you to achieve the effect of "live" speech - 47 male and female voices are available in 24 languages. Polly is easy to use: after sending the text, the service will immediately return to the application the corresponding audio stream in mp3 format. In addition to playback, the resulting files can be saved to work in the future. Its API makes it easy to add a voice to your website, mobile app or social network.



The third service presented is directly related to Amazon Alexa - based on a service called “Lex” and a smart assistant was created. Lex allows you to develop applications that support complex text and voice dialogs — developers can create and edit conversation patterns in a dedicated Lex Console console. Lex includes deep learning features such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language understanding (NLU).

The tool allows you to create chat bots, web and mobile applications based on natural speech. Lex is deeply integrated with other AWS services, and also supports integration with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Zendesk, and other business systems, which allows it to be applied, like previous Amazon practices, in many business areas.

Just as Uber changed the way customers use taxi services, and the iPhone ten years ago changed the approach to using the phone, Amazon is gradually changing consumer habits in the area of ​​buying the most necessary — food.

Amazon has a restaurant delivery service for Prime Now, Amazon Restaurants participants. Recently, Alexa received another new item in the piggy bank of their Skills: Amazon Prime members can now place an order using the restaurant name or kitchen type using Alexa-compatible devices. For re-order will be used history of previous customer orders. Voice control comes to the fore in all life situations, and with the help of Alexa, customers of Amazon Restaurants will be fully involved in the ecosystem of technological innovator.



We must not forget about the fundamentally new grocery store without cash registers, cashiers and queues, launched by Amazon in Seattle at the end of the year - Amazon Go . A client with a smartphone can enter such a store, take goods from the shelves and just leave, and the Internet of things, artificial intelligence and payment technologies will do the rest.



If we talk about numbers, over the past holidays, sales of Amazon devices of the Echo family have grown by almost 10 times compared to last year. The smart device Echo Dot has become the best-selling product on the gift, and millions of Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Fire TV Stick and Fire tablets have spread around the world, each of which has voice control and answers to specified actions using Alexa AI.

How many smart assistants were sold by the company? Amazon declined to give specific figures, but according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners researchers, sales of such devices in the United States exceeded 5 million units in 2014, 2 million of which were sold in the first 9 months of 2016.

According to statistics, in 2015, 0.3% of the US population or 0.8% of households acquired Amazon Echo . Since then, the device has received several times more skills thanks to thousands of new Skills, sold at discounted prices, and, of course, has a higher level of consumer awareness. If we apply these estimates to the UK and German markets, sales could be about 450,000 - 510,000 devices in new countries, and the figure of 5 million devices for the entire period looks plausible.



Thus, along with the company's three main areas - the marketplace, Amazon Prime service and Amazon Web Services - Alexa can become the fourth area.

“Alexa may be the“ search engine ”of the future. Amazon is betting on this, ” said CEO Jeff Bezos at the end of May 2016.

Summarizing the above, we can confidently say that Amazon was one of the first to set the benchmark in retail in the field of AI, representing a leader in the development of technologies of the 4th industrial revolution , gradually bringing closer the day when comprehensive technologies and the opportunities available with their help a lot of geeks, but also ordinary people.