What Happened
Amazon’s connected speaker is quickly expanding beyond its initial functionality, adding support for a handful of new third-party platforms, including popular event booking and ticket sale platform StubHub, as well as several smart-home platforms such as Cree. The StubHub integration, in particular, stands out for it customizes the information based on location and utilizes Alexa, Echo’s embedded virtual assistant, to offer info about events nearby within a natural, conversational context.
What Brands Should Do
As a nascent media platform, devices like Amazon Echo and, allegedly, Apple TV – both well-poised to become the central hubs of connected devices and all sorts of services – are slowly and surely gaining momentum as the future standard of digital interactions. And brands, especially those in the ecommerce and smart-home space, need to be mindful of its potential. For brands that wish to experiment with Amazon Echo, there is the Alexa Skills Kit, a free SDK that allows for creating new features for Echo’s platform and integrating branded digital assets with Alexa’s conversational U/I.
Source: Engadget
Header image courtesy of Amazon Echo Product Page
