Now that Alexa is everywhere, the personal assistant will integrate advertisements into its most common answers

Amazon has announced the opening of a program allowing brands to record responses for its voice assistant, Alexa.

During its Accelerate conference, Amazon unveiled the development of a new feature for Alexa, its voice assistant: the possibility for brands to record their own answers for the questions most often asked by users. Necessarily oriented responses.

Some Alexa responses will now be dictated by brands

Since it was made available to the general public, Alexa, the voice assistant published by Amazon, has been responding generically to questions asked by its users. And for any query out of what he knew, he just pulled out an answer from a search engine. But the Customers Ask Alexa program might just be a game-changer.

The concept is as follows: any brand registered with Amazon Brand Registry, Amazon’s advertising and affiliate program, will be able to know the questions most frequently asked by users. And more importantly, it will be able to submit proposals for answers, which one imagines necessarily not very objective. After moderation and quality control, these responses can be used by voice assistant owners. The service is expected to be fully rolled out between late 2022 and mid-2023, depending on the medium.

How does Amazon benefit from this?

Amazon justifies this decision by explaining that the best product experts are the brands themselves. Moreover, even if this practice is similar to a new way of bringing advertising into the home, Amazon does not currently plan to charge companies that use this service.

Still, Amazon may hope to capture a new share of the advertising market by creating a space to distribute it. Before perhaps making the brands pay? Either way, it would be surprising if Jeff Bezos’ company didn’t have an idea in mind to make a net profit out of it.

This functionality, which may not correspond to the strict definition of advertising, is in any case a means of encouraging users to buy more and more. And since the brands authorized to create responses are partners of Amazon, those who let themselves be convinced by these announcements will a priori go through the platform of the American giant. Who should therefore, clearly, find an interest in it.

Source : Neowin, Tech Crunch