As the Smart Home gains traction, Amazon’s Alexa voice-activation is gaining equal amounts of traction in the market. Amazon announced that it has increased the number of skills ported to Alexa by more than 3x since June, resulting in more than 3,000 Alexa skills now available to customers.
The Amazon Echo, powered by Alexa, is one Smart Home product that can now be used to command GE appliances through voice. Source: Alexa Amazon launched its Alexa Skills Kit and Alexa Voice Service just over a year ago. These tools were offered to developers for free in order to integrate Alexa into their own products. Now Amazon has more than 3,000 skills for Alexa, and that list is growing quickly. Recently Ledvance made its smart lighting technology available to the voice activation of Alexa, Honeywell connected its smart thermostats to the technology, August Home ported its smart locks, and iDevices’ range of Smart Home products are enabled by Alexa.
In the coming months, Amazon says customers will be able to use Alexa to manage fantasy football leagues in Yahoo Sports Fantasy Football, get stock quotes and more from Bloomberg, hear updates from Twitter, control Hyundai Genesis G80 and G90 cars, track misplaced phones using Find My Phone, book a trip through Kayak, track nutrition through Food Tracker, find tequila recipes via Patrón and control lights through TP-Link Kasa.
To contact the author of this article, email engineering360editors@ihs.com
