Amazon’s Alexa has executed a surprise takeover of the smart home industry since the launch of the Echo a few years ago, but now the company is opening up Alexa’s technology for other applications. According to a report from Reuters, Amazon is giving developers access to the same tools that make up the foundations of Alexa via a new platform called Amazon Lex.
This essentially lets developers build new voice- or text-based chatbots into their existing apps, adding an interactive portion that wasn’t available before. While Amazon has allowed companies to build Alexa into their products for quite some time—it nearly took over the smart home section of this year’s CES—Lex allows developers to quickly build chatbots that give the users the power to control their services with voice or text input.
This newfound freedom developers have to use Amazon Lex will likely open up new uses for Amazon’s voice assistant technology.Amazon wants developers to integrate Alexa features into chatbots and eventually Alexa.
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