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Amazon really wants third-party developers to adopt its Alexa assistant

Cortana and Siri may be the current kings of the virtual assistant market, but Amazon wants to gain ground with its new Alexa assistant by opening the artificial intelligence platform up to developers. As the company announced yesterday, the voice-controlled assistant is now free for any developer that wants to use it in their third-party devices. Amazon also has a new $100 million investment fund for companies looking to build their own voice technology. 

Could Amazon actually win the race to build the most widely-used AI voice platform? As unlikely as it sounds, Amazon is pushing far harder than Microsoft or Apple to get its technology into the hands of other companies. Today, Amazon said it would make Alexa—the voice-controlled assistant that sits inside its Echo hardware—free to any developers who want to use the software in their third-party devices. Not only is Alexa now free to use for other companies through an SDK skills kit though; she’s also the subject of a new $100 million investment fund Amazon announced today, aimed at investing in companies that are building voice technology. In other words, Amazon wants to win the voice-controlled UI game–and it’s putting a considerable amount of money and free software behind smaller companies that want to collaborate.

What do you think?

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Written by Chastity Mansfield

I'm a writer, an amateur designer, and a collector of trinkets that nobody else wants. You can find me on Noozeez, and Twitter.

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