BENGALURU,NOV 09:
Amazon is betting big to sell its voice-activated artificial intelligence assistant Alexa in the country and woo Indian consumers. The online retail giant said that Alexa had acquired 20,000 skills such as telling cricket score, conducting quizzes and doing utilities to serve Indian customers since last October when it launched Alexa-powered Amazon Echo line of speakers in the country.
The skills of Alexa, which competes with Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana, have “grown by 100% in just a year as it started with 10,000 skills” in the country, according to Amazon.
“We have got hundreds of thousands of people [who have bought Echo devices]…all the way from Jammu and Kashmir to Kanyakumari to Port Blair. We got a lot of diversity of utterances,” said Puneesh Kumar, country manager for Alexa Experiences and Devices, Amazon India, in an interview. If one stacked all the Echo devices sold in India so far, the combined height “would be over four times taller than Mount Everest,” he said.
13-year-old developer
Amazon is proactively creating a valuable ecosystem around its Alexa voice computing platform, according to research firm CB Insights. It said currently, the Alexa platform offers software development kits (SDKs) that allow third-party developers to build skills for the AI assistant. Amazon also works with hardware manufacturers to integrate the Alexa assistant into their products.
“We have an open platform where anybody can build a skill very easily,” said Dilip R.S., country manager for Alexa Skills, Amazon India, in an interview. He said that India had over 3.5 million developers and the company wanted to tap into this talent pool.
