Amazon’s Alexa voice platform allows customers to shop on Amazon with voice commands rather than browsing and selecting.
Amazon has been making it easier to shop using voice with Alexa, but the company’s focus now seems to increasingly be turning to using the voice assistant as a platform to trial digital subscriptions like music and video streaming.
In its most recent earnings call, Amazon executives hinted that the company would focus more on selling services, like Amazon’s unlimited music-streaming service, to go along with its Alexa devices.
Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant is maturing, and so is its path to monetization.
In Amazon’s quarterly earnings call on July 26, the company’s head of investor relations, Dave Fildes, said that people were “enjoying” the company’s Alexa-powered devices, but didn’t directly address its role as a voice-shopping service.
“I think we’re having a lot of success with devices and customers are enjoying those,” Fildes said in response to an analyst’s question about the impact that Alexa is having on Amazon’s retail business.
He continued: “Coming out of Prime Day, [we] had some good success and happy customers enjoying some of the devices there. The focus now is really having a good and exciting roadmap of recent revises and more to come ahead, and getting those into customers’ hands.”
Amazon has made improvements to Alexa shopping with new initiatives like integrating it with Whole Foods delivery through Prime Now, but the company has shared few specific details about how customers are actually shopping with their voices.
Taking that in a vacuum, you might think that the voice-shopping future that Amazon heralded with Alexa’s debut has not yet arrived.
However, Amazon has yet to throw down its ace in the hole: digital services made better by Alexa. Amazon’s services — like audiobooks, grocery, and music streaming — have stayed in the …read more
Source:: Business Insider