Real Madrid Soccer Team Launches Amazon Alexa Skill
Spanish soccer team Real Madrid has created a skill for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Real Madrid is the first Spanish soccer team to have its own Alexa Skill, the latest sports club to build a presence on the voice assistant platform.
Official Sports Voices
The Real Madrid Alexa Skill is a reasonably self-contained voice app offering news stories and summaries about Real Madrid, including links to the team’s website for videos. It can speak in both Spanish and English and provides access to the Real Madrid TV television owned by the organization. Though Real Madrid is the first soccer team in Spain to have an Alexa Skill, English team Liverpool already has an Alexa Skill to give the news to fans. European soccer teams aren’t alone in exploring setting up Alexa Skills. Alexa supports the official voice skill of New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team. In the U.S., the NBA has set up Alexa Skills for all of its teams, and there are official Alexa Skills from the NFL, NHL, and MLB. Amazon also has the exclusive rights to broadcast the US Open.
Alexa Sports Fan
That Real Madrid picked Alexa for its first voice skill is a win for Amazon as it works to add sports features to the platform. Alexa can serve as a fantasy football coach thanks to a skillset from sports conversational AI developer StatMuse offering advice and suggestions for fantasy football players. Alexa has also been adding sports information in general to its repertoire over the last few years. Alexa may be scoring more points, but Google has its own sports strategy. Last year, for instance, Google Assistant kept fans of the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup informed on standings and stats of the teams and players.
As more people adopt smart speakers and other voice assistant-enabled devices, additional sports leagues and teams are likely to start connecting to fans via voice skills. Like social media and other outlets, voice assistant platforms provide a way for a team to set its own brand and interact more directly with fans. It’s easy to imagine sports stars becoming the next celebrity voices for a voice assistant the way Samuel L. Jackson has for Alexa. Sports could add a new facet to the way that voice assistants are integrating into smart TVs and other smart home devices. An official sports team skill could be used to adjust lighting and changing the channel to the game automatically, perhaps even connecting exclusive audio commentary. Team news read out to fans is potentially just the first kick for Real Madrid and other teams.
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