Amazon rolls out notification support for third party Alexa Apps

At it’s Re:Invent conference last night, Amazon introduced a lot of new things including Alexa Business. Among those were something which rather went unnoticed. The company has now enabled access for developers to send out notifications when asked, “Alexa, What did I miss?” This will allow developers to let users check for any pending notifications from Third-Party apps. If pending notifications are found, the LED light on the top will turn green indicating the user to check for notifications. Till now it was only available for selected apps including news, weather, and food delivery apps and is expanding for others starting today.

Apart from this, the company also introduced a way to let developers leverage the Alexa voice to power their applications. Alexa will now be able to distinguish between the voices and provide a personalized experience to every person in the house. This will allow Amazon to take on and beat Google who had provided the similar support for Google Home but only with native apps.

Amazon is really trying to gain control over the smart home category and the new updates are just the evidence of the same. It will be interesting to see how other companies respond to the same considering the fact that Amazon has over 25,000 skills now which allows users to do anything from playing songs to order food and control their lighting.

Via: TechCrunch