Amazon will award $100 promotional credits to developers who publish Alexa Skills, which allow users to use natural language commands to control voice-controlled devices like Echo.
Developers who use Amazon Web Services Inc.’s (AWS) free Tier to publish Alexa Skills and then exceed their limits and incur usage fees will receive monthly credits.
The AWS free tier provides 1 million AWS Lambda request and up to 750 hours Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute per month at no cost.
AWS will send $100 promotional credit to developers who create skills, such as those that play a song, answer questions, or control smart home devices. This promotion is good for the rest of the month.
All developers who publish an Alexa skill live will be eligible to receive a $100 credit for one year.
Steve Rabuchin, an executive, stated today that “there is already a large and engaged community of developers building skills for Alexa.” “Today, we are excited to announce a new program which will allow developers to create more robust skills that can take full advantage of AWS services. We are excited to see what Alexa developers create.”
Amazon stated that the program would be beneficial to developers who have different levels of usage for published skills. For example, the Hurricane Center skill leverages AWS Lambda in order to provide storm information to users. Terren Peterson, the creator of the service, stated that “now, if my skill is extensively used during hurricane season, then I can be sure that those scalable costs are covered with this new program.” It makes my mind more relaxed and allows me to help more people prepare for storms.
The Alexa Development Program provides a free SDK called “Alexa Skills Kit self service APIs, documentation, and code samples” that leverages the Alexa Voice Service in order to bring voice capabilities to connected devices.
Amazon claims that the Alexa skill service adapts to user inputs and becomes “smarter” by leveraging machine learning (ML). Amazon described the program as a way for developers to get started with ML and other cutting edge technologies such as speech-based natural interfaces.
VoiceLabs’ recent research shows that while Alexa skills and other intelligent assistants like Google Home can help developers learn new technologies, it has not paid off so far. VoiceLabs provides “voice experience analysis.” In January, the company stated that “As per this report, no [voice first] application has been successfully monetized.” We predict that one of the major platforms will implement a compelling monetization strategy by Q2 2017.
To apply for the program, developers can visit the Amazon developer website.
