Amazon Selects 10 New Alexa Champions

Amazon has added 10 new members to the rank of Alexa Champion. The newest additions to the program represent a global group highlighting Alexa’s reach and the diverse ways the voice assistant is in use today.

Champion Team

“Enthusiastic, focused, and passionate. Those are a few of the words that come to mind when I think of people in the growing Alexa community who help us invent and build the future of voice technology and ambient computing,” Alexa chief technology evangelist Jeff Blankenburg wrote in a blog post announcing the new winners. “They are a diverse group of engineers, designers, and conversational UI/UX experts recognized by Amazon for excellence in their achievements and contributions to the global Alexa community. Their knowledge and passion for Alexa continues to educate others. In fact, in just the last year, Alexa Champions generated over 1.3 million engagements a month from their 143 unique skills.”

Alexa Champion is a title that comes with some notable perks for developers. They are the inner cohort that Amazon asks to test out new ideas and programs, giving them early access to some of the features still in the pipeline for Alexa. They also have a closer connection to the people at Amazon making the big decisions about Alexa, access most developers don’t get. Amazon lists 70 Alexa Champions all told. The 10 in this year’s group are less than half of the 26 who joined last year, but still represent a broad cross-section of developers and supporters.

This year’s cohort and an example of their world include:

Alexander Martin – APL Ninja,

Ashish Jha – Vixen Labs, Freelance Developer

Dyung Ngo – CogniVocal,

Joao Paulo Alqueres – Iara Digital

Jody Burnett: VoiceSkills Inc.

Katherine Prescott – VoiceBrew

Maaike Coppens – GreenShoot Labs,  VoiceLunch BookClub

Steve Tingiris –  Dabble Lab

Suneet Patil  – Alexa Community India.

Xavier Portilla Edo– The Alexa Revolution

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