over(s)kill?

Alexa, how skilled are you?

Developers are creating voice skills across use cases for Alexa. But the Amazon voice assistant’s success is tethered to the skills it has, and right now, these are inconsistent

Arundhati Ramanathan, 17 Oct 2018

In just a year Alexa India Skills store is teeming with 19,000 skills built by 40,000 developers

The skills though are repetitive (there are over 100 cat fact skills alone) and more importantly hard to find

Companies that have adopted voice skills are finding that voice cannot be used across all use cases

Building a voice skill has its share of complexities in spite of Amazon making it very easy for developers

Teacher: “Alexa, open English Teacher.”

Alexa: “Good morning, class. What do you want to learn today? Prepositions, pronouns, or articles?”

Teacher: “Open pronouns for class two, section C.”

Alexa: “Ok! I would like Ravi and Anusha to come forward for a small activity,” calling two children from that class.

AUTHOR

Arundhati Ramanathan

Arundhati is Bengaluru-based. She is interested in how people use money in the digital age and how new economies will take shape based on that interaction. She has spent over 10 years reporting and writing on various subjects. Previous stints were at Mint, Outlook Business and Reuters.

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Alexa, how skilled are you?