What are the 4 important news you need to know to start your week in voice?

Amazon Alexa SDK for auto

Good morning, happy Monday. I wish you all have a great and productive week ahead. Last week Amazon announced their SDK for developers to develop applications on Alexa for autos. The SDK is available for developers on github. The SDK includes support for streaming media, smart home controls, weather reports, and Alexa’s many skills. It’s the first time developers will be able to get a first look at how Amazon wants to integrate Alexa into in-vehicles. It will take some time for developers to get familiar with Alexa Auto, so we’ll likely see more cars ship with Alexa in 2019 and beyond. What we are seeing now it’s Amazon moving to every possible context where their smart assistant Alexa might possible be. And as rumour has it, they might be even trying to release an smart phone. Alexa in cars will also be competing with Andoid Auto and Apple’s CarPlay for the attention of the automotive industry. According to a study by SEO Tribunal, the car it’s the places where users use voice search the most. So it’s expected this would be a battle ground for companies to dominate.

Samsung unveils their smart speaker: Galaxy Home

Samsung did some unveiling this past week, among which is their smart speaker Galaxy Home, landing with Bixby as smart assistant. It was shown, but we don’t know when the is actually launching.  The design is somewhat different that the other smart speakers in the market, and some Twitter went full on it, some Twitter comments said it’s similar to a grill, a spaceship and a portal entry. Pretty far off comparisons. Design specificities apart, it seems to be a high end device with several speakers and bigger than the competitors. On the music streaming service,  Samsung is gonna ride Spotify from it’s phone to its refrigerators. I’m interested to see how their mobile Bixby assistant it’s received by users compared by Google.

Google released audio news, a functionality similar to Alexa’s flash briefings

Following their Lenovo launch with the first smart display for the Google Assistant, the company announced that users can now get video or audio news briefings to catch you up on headlines. For now, the update is available only in the US and not open to the general public. According to their blog post, they will be learning from U.S to expand further. I do hope they open to the general public. It’s good they came forward with a feature that’s growing in popularity every day for users worldwide. I can’t wait to delete the code we have now to make this briefing available on Google Assistant.

We are now part of VoiceFirst.fm

Last news, but not less important, on Saturday we announced that we are now part of Voicefirst.fm, along with This Week in Voice, Voice in Healthcare, Voice Marketing and other important podcasts in the voice ecosystem. We are thrilled to come onboard to the VoiceFirst.fm family and to build this partnership.

Thank you for listening, have a great day and week, and we’ll certainly talk tomorrow.