At a time when the tech world greets Amazon Echo Show, a new smart home assistant from the American e-commerce giant, the company has announced some exciting updates related to the device. The all new Echo Show, which is powered by Amazon's cloud-based voice service Alexa, will soon get optimised visual interfaces as the company is going to add new functionalities to the Alexa Skills Kit.
The Amazon Echo Show comes out of the box with over 12,000 Alexa skills created by developers. These skills display any skill cards users currently return in their response objects, something which is similar to how users see Alexa skill cards on the Alexa app or a Fire Tablet today. Amazon doesn't want these cards to replace the voice experience, but to deliver value-added content with extra information.
Now, Amazon is making it even easier for developers to send a video to the Echo Show via an Amazon-built video player. The video could be rendered on the device while allowing customers to control the playback with voice and touch.
"When we introduce display interfaces in ASK later this summer, you'll be able to choose from several GUI templates for your skill. You will also be able to stream videos on Echo Show using the new video player interfaces in the Alexa Skills Kit," Amazon said in a blog post, addressing developers.
The Smart Home Skill API for Alexa is also getting enhancements to allow the Echo Show to display a video feed from a smart home camera, requiring minimal effort from developers.
According to Amazon, Echo Show currently includes updated skills from Allrecipes, Jeopardy, Uber, OpenTable, CNN and more while developers are working on to get "more delightful customer experiences" to the device.
Meanwhile, a new report from Emarketer has brought some good news for voice-activated digital assistants in the U.S., estimating that 35.6 million Americans will use such a device at least once a month in 2017 -- an increase of 129 percent over last year.
The report is even more encouraging for Amazon as its Echo speaker is projected to account for 70.6 percent of all digital assistant use in the US. Google Home is expected to trail far behind with just 23.8 percent share of the market.
