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Alexa Live 2022 Recap Show with Firstenburg, Tucker, and Schwartz – Voicebot Podcast Ep 265

The Amazon Alexa Live event for 2022 introduced a couple of dozen new features for developers, new revenue-sharing agreements, and a new era of simultaneous voice assistants. The Two Voice Devs, Allen Firstenberg (Google Assistant GDE) and Mark Tucker (Alexa Champion), along with Voicebot’s Eric Schwartz and Bret Kinsella break down the announcements and sort through the type of impacts we can expect. We have both a video and audio version of this week’s podcast.

Alexa Live Hot Takes – Allen Firstenburg and Mark Tucker

Alexa Live 2022 arrived at a time when Amazon may have felt they could take a victory lap in the voice developer ecosystems battles. Google recently announced the sunsetting of its programs for most third-party conversational actions. Going forward, Google Assistant will only offer first-party actions along with third-party solutions for select smart home and media services. Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant has also been focused on smart home though it does still provide third-party developer support at a smaller scale. Apple never created an ecosystem of Siri developers outside of the limited features available in iOS.

There was some concern that Amazon might see this as an opportunity to pull back on its investment in third-party developer features, but Alexa Live suggests the company is still committed to the ecosystem. In fact, Amazon expanded features to help developers gain new users and even announced a more favorable revenue-sharing agreement.

Tucker and Firstenberg are active developers in multiple voice assistant ecosystems. They offered insights on what the new announcements mean and how the market has evolved. Schwartz and Kinsella both had a chance for a behind-the-scenes interview with an Amazon executive and offer up their takes beyond the formal presentations.

You can listen to the podcast interview above, on Google or Apple Podcasts, or most of the leading podcast players.

 

 

 

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