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THE NEXT LEVEL OF INTELLIGENCE Hall 26 b 4 Sept. 2017 4:30pm TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT SHOULD ENRICH CUSTOMERS’ LIVES. Fabrice Rousseau Amazon’s General Manager Europe, Alexa Skills and Voice Service Amazon on The Power of Voice Fabrice Rousseau, Amazon’s General Manager Europe for Alexa Skills and Voice Service, says he is passionate about changing customers’ daily lives with technology. His team helps European brands, manufacturers, service providers and developers create exciting voice experience for their customers, by integrating with Amazon Alexa voice assistant via software (skills) or hardware (voice service). To start with, we asked him a little more about Alexa Skills and Voice Service... The Alexa Skill Kit is a collection of free, selfservice APIs and tools that make it fast and easy for developers to create new voice-driven capabilities for Alexa. With a few lines of code, developers can easily integrate existing web services with Alexa or, in just a few hours, they can build entirely new experiences designed around voice. The Alexa Voice Service (AVS) on the other side allows hardware makers to integrate Alexa into their Internet-connected devices with only a few lines of code in their local language. As with the Alexa Skill Kit, no experience with natural language understanding or speech recognition is required. Since early 2017, AVS enables developers to integrate Alexa into their devices in German. Can you please give us an outline of what people can expect to learn about in your presentation at the IFA+ Summit? Technological development should enrich customers’ lives. Our main focus has been on creating a compelling user experience through natural user interfaces for quite a while now. With our cloudbased voice service Alexa, we have created a user interface that is intuitive and versatile alike enabling unlimited use cases in the smart home, for instance. We are working on constantly improving the quality of the voice service and creating more and more scenarios in the fields of smart homes, buildings and spaces to help Alexa and voice control become an integral part of everyday life. At IFA+ Summit, we’d like to provide insights into our work. How does the future look? How and when will consumers’ lives be changed or enhanced thanks to new technologies? It is hard to predict timings but at Amazon, we believe that voice will fundamentally improve the way people will interact with technology. From our point of view, technological innovation is driven by the need and the intention to simplify everyday life and to enable as many people as possible to benefit from it. With Amazon Alexa, for example, it is easy like never before to control the smart home and we believe this development will continue to bring more and more use cases and benefits to customers. What kind of people should attend your talk? Everyone interested in hearing how we at Amazon believe voice – the most natural user interface – transforms the way we interact with technology today and in the future, should take their time to attend the talk ALEXA AT A GLANCE Alexa is an intelligent personal assistant developed by Amazon, made popular by the Amazon Echo and the Amazon Echo Dot devices. In November 2014, Amazon announced Alexa alongside the Echo. Alexa was inspired by the computer voice and conversational system on board the Starship Enterprise in science fiction TV series and movies, beginning with Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation. Alexa is capable of voice interaction, music playback, making to-do lists, setting alarms, streaming podcasts, playing audiobooks, and providing weather, traffic, and other real time information, such as news. Alexa can also control smart devices. Most devices with Alexa allow users to activate the device using a wake-word (such as Echo); other devices (such as the Amazon app on iOS or Android) require the user to push a button to activate Alexa's listening mode. Currently, Alexa can only interact and communicate in English and German www.ifa-international.org IFA International • Friday 1 st September 2017 29
