Alexa, Amazon Echo's intelligent voice assistant, now offers more than 1,000 third-party skills, thanks to innovators like Uber and SciFutures jumping into the fray.
A large developer
network has been working to build out utilities that support functions on Amazon Echo, Fire TV, Tap, and other Alexa-enabled smart home appliances. It puts Amazon well ahead of the competition, Google
Home. The developers have been working to build utilities for Alexa like Chore Minder from SciFutures aimed at teaching kids to say "please" and "thank you."
"Children yell at Alexa and treat
her like a slave," said Ari Popper, a futurist and CEO of SciFutures. "They're rude."
Popper says developers at his company -- which uses science fiction prototyping and storytelling to
help Fortune 500 clients like Clorox, Hershey, Ford and Visa create connections with consumers -- built a learning app for Amazon Echo that teaches children manners and helps them keep track of the
chores.
The simple-to-use utility -- Chore Minder -- requires the child to say "please" and "thank you." Fostering polite interaction with Alexa, the utility tracks chores throughout the
week and rewards the child for positive actions such as when she takes out the trash, cleans her room or washes the dishes.
In addition to SciFutures, developers from companies
like Capital One, Domino's, Fitbit, Kayak, and Samsung have been working to extend the platform to allow users to call up information about their food orders, health, and travel plans
just by speaking commands.
Developers use the Alexa Skills Kit to build skills for Alexa. They can also create custom skills with ASK by designing their voice UI and simply building
cloud-hosted code that interacts with Alexa cloud-based APIs to process customer requests. Alexa does the work to hear, understand, and resolve the customer's spoken request, and then maps the service
call to the developer's endpoint.