Amazon has announced that their Alexa voice technology, which powers the company's weird Echo voice assistant and cylindrical speaker, is now available to third party developers, allowing them to integrate the technology into their products for free.
Amazon has bundled their Alexa technology into the Alexa Voice Service, which includes APIs, utilities, sample code, and support documents that give developers the tools they need to integrate the service into software or devices.
The Alexa Voice Service is currently just a developer preview, but Amazon says developers should find it easy to integrate the voice assistant into their products. Apparently no experience with voice recognition or natural language processing is required, and it should only take a few hours to integrate the Voice Service into a device.
Reviews of the Amazon Echo praised the device for its solid voice recognition technology, so there are plenty of reasons for developers to use Amazon's Alexa Voice Service in their products. It also provides an alternative to Google, Apple and Microsoft's voice assistant tools, which are mostly closed source and proprietary.
The Alexa Voice Service might end up being quite an attractive option to developers, considering it's free to use and integrate. Voice technology is becoming more important as we move to a world littered with Internet of Things devices, so we might see the Alexa Voice Service appear in new devices pretty soon.