Voice conversation using cloud →
In the Episode #106 of AWS podcast, Jeff Barr and David Isbitski had an interesting discussion on the Amazon Echo device and the Alexa Voice Service that resides behind it.
It’s great we have another player on the scene that increases competition in the field.
The interesting part is that all the magic happens in the cloud (of course!). As a developer, you can extend device functionality:
- create your own hosted cloud service;
- your service comminicates with the Alexa Voice Service (with JSON/HTTP);
- the Alexa Voice Service converts normal spoken language and provide your service with data in your predefined contract
So, as a developer you’re not building apps but building skills.
One more thing is the Alexa Skills Kit - you can build you very own “echo” devices as long as it has speaker, microphone and an internet connection.
From the privacy point of view, it’s said that customer data never leaves Amazon data centers.
Another existing thing is Amazon launches the Alexa Fund which is a $100M fund to ignite the application development for the service.
It’s hard to describe all the details so I highly recommend you to listen to this episode. Have fun! :)