Amazon will now allow third-party companies the unprecedented privilege of accessing the core artificial intelligence underpinning its Alexa digital assistant, a first for the company’s AI platform.

While Amazon has allowed companies to build skills for Alexa and allows pretty much any consumer electronic device maker to integrate Alexa into a compatible product, the e-commerce giant has not licensed the underlying AI tech for use in other assistant-like products. Amazon is calling the new offering Alexa Custom Assistant, and it’s starting out with a focus on the auto market.

Amazon is doing so to allow not just automobile manufacturers, but any company with a need for a digital voice assistant more control over the software experience. This will allow companies to create their own wake words and custom voices and capabilities Amazon says will “co-exist” with Alexa as it’s designed to work today. For the auto market, this provides Amazon the added benefit of having its software built directly into cars.

 “Building an intelligent assistant is complex, time-consuming, and costly. Further, the rate of innovation and change is accelerating and assistants are always improving and getting smarter, requiring substantial ongoing investments,” the company explains in a blog post. “The Alexa Custom Assistant addresses this challenge by allowing companies to leverage Alexa’s world-class technology stack to create their own intelligent assistant without the investment, long development cycles, and resources to build it from scratch and maintain over time.”

Amazon says companies will get access to custom wake words that use “the same state-of-the-art process” used for developing new Alexa wake words. Companies can create their own unique voices for the assistants with help from “voice science experts” from Amazon that will help manage the recording process and the machine learning-based algorithms to build out the voice library.

The screens and software experiences inside car have proven to be a ripe market for companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google. But only the latter two tech giants have their own mobile operating systems that allow for plug-in platforms like Apple’s CarPlay and Google’s Android Auto.

Amazon is now trying to better position Alexa as a built-in solution in environments that may not require a phone at all, thereby bypassing the need to compete directly with Apple and Google.

Source- The Verge

Country- U.S