Amazon Releases APIs for Alexa Speech Recognition Service

Amazon has announced APIs for Alexa, a speech recognition service used by, among others, Echo, a voice-activated speaker. In addition, Amazon is pumping 100 million dollars, approximately 90 million euros, into a fund to boost the use of Alexa.

The Echo speaker recently became available on the US market. The underlying Alexa speech recognition algorithms run on Amazon’s cloud servers. The API, which will be available to developers next month, should link software and hardware to Alexa and, optionally, Echo with just a few lines of code. In addition, Alexa Skills Kit has also been developed, an api to teach Alexa new voice commands.

Amazon states that the Alexa APIs, part of Amazon Voice Services, are completely free to use by third parties. A number of manufacturers are already using the speech recognition technology, for example Wink to control home automation applications and Toymail, a company that makes toys and can deliver voice messages.

With the announcement of an API and the creation of a $100 million fund for developers and startups, Amazon hopes to make its speech recognition system compete with Apple’s Siri, Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana, among others.