Amazon will ‘double down’ on Alexa

The latest trading update from Amazon contained an interesting statement about the future of the smart speaker market.

Amazon boss Jeff Bezos said of their smart speaker Alexa,

Our 2017 projections for Alexa were very optimistic.

We don’t see surprises of this magnitude very often – expect us to double down.

Amazon announced just after Christmas that it had sold ‘tens of millions’ of its Alexa devices over the festive season.

These devices represent an emerging technology that now offer more than 30,000 skills and the ability to control 4,000 different devices.

Alexa dominates the digital voice assistant market with a 70%+ market share, although Google and Apple both have their eyes on the prize too.

Google launched its Home product in November 2016 (featuring Google Assistant) and Apple (with digital voice assistant Siri) are hot on their heels with the launch of the Homepod early this year.

We should expect these smart speakers and digital voice assistants to play an increasingly important role in our home and office lives, as the technology continues to develop and the major players promote their own devices.

The marketing applications for smart speakers are varied and exciting.

We started experimenting with the creation of a Flash Briefing Skill for a client last summer, deployed via Amazon Alexa as an audio briefing with personal finance and investing headlines.

Relaunched this month as The Briefing from Informed Choice, the content is deployable as a blog post with embedded audio player, podcast episode on Apple Podcasts, and Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing Skill.

Once activated in the Alexa app, or online at amazon.co.uk/Informed-Choice-Radio/dp/B074DZZ1MF, users simply say,

Alexa, what’s in the news?

to play the latest audio briefing.

As a way to keep the brand at the front of mind with existing and prospective clients, demonstrate innovation and deliver valuable content, this Flash Briefing Skill ticks a number of boxes.

The Briefing also lends itself to the creation of ‘micro-content’ which can be shared across the range of social media platforms, notably audiograms – image cards with animated audio waves and text animations.

With smart speaker technology still relatively new, early adopters who develop skills for Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple Homepod have a great opportunity to share their message and increase their profile.