Amazon's Alexa Voice Service Opened to Third Party Hardware Makers

Last week, Amazon announced that 3rd party hardware developers can use its Alexa Voice Service (AVS), the voice recognition technology that powers the company's Echo home assistant, to integrate into their Internet-connected devices. According to Amazon, integrating AVS will be completely free, and all it takes is a couple lines of code with a hardware that has a speaker, an Internet connection, and a microphone. 

Amazon's Alexa is being used as the voice-activated virtual assistant behind Amazon’s Echo interactive speaker, letting users a hands-free and always on 'robot' to provide information, music, news, weather, and more from across the room and get results or answers instantly and also to shop from Amazon’s online store with voice.

Alexa which is built in the cloud and leverages AWS to continue to learn and add functionalities, has over the last seven months added Pandora, Audible, traffic, sports scores and schedules, control of connected devices like WeMo and Philips Hue, IFTTT, and more to its platform. 

Greg Hart, Vice President, Amazon Echo and Alexa Voice Services
Today, we’re excited to open up the Alexa Voice Service to any device maker that wants to add Alexa into their products—for free. We’ve made adding Alexa incredibly easy for developers—any device with a speaker, an Internet connection, and a microphone can integrate Alexa with just a few lines of code. From start-ups to established companies, we can’t wait to see how developers integrate Alexa.