Amazon wants Alexa to be more useful for seniors. It opens up to companies to catch this “business opportunity”.
The head of Amazon’s virtual assistant, Max Amordeluso, announced at the MWC in Barcelona that the e-commerce giant is looking for new talents and startups to expand the reach of its voice service, especially in the field of care for people of the third Age.
More potential to Alexa
Amordeluso has participated in a conference at the Four Years from Now (4YFN), the entrepreneurship event promoted by Mobile World Capital Barcelona and GSMA, where he has insisted on the “business opportunity” offered by the company.
“We need the creativity of external people,” said the manager, who explained that “Amazon can pay for a service developed by another person or company for Alexa and create tools that help the population to live more independently.”
The firm’s ‘guru’ has provided several examples of the potential uses of Alexa, whose service is already included in almost all Amazon’s new products and which, he said, is available in 40 countries.
From lowering a blind to managing television
According to Amodeluso, the Alexa system is “a great opportunity to do good from the technology”, for example “facilitating the life of patients of a hospital” with voice commands that allow to raise or lower a blind or change the channel of television to a patient who can not move.
Another application that they seek to develop would be to assist older people who spend a lot of time alone at home or who suffer from mental illnesses and offer them a “more independent” life.
To do this, Alexa would respond to everyday questions such as “is the door closed?”, Create memory games or even control the type of medication you have to take.
The artificial intelligence system that they seek to develop would be able to warn emergencies if they detect that the user has suffered a domestic accident.
“Alexa can be a help to a lot of people”
“I do not say that it is a substitute for human company,” Amordeluso clarified, “but there is great power in speaking aloud and Alexa can be a help to many people,” he said. And he added: “this technology can be created today”.
Another aspect that Amazon is working on is improving Alexa’s capacity and learning pace, so that it becomes “emotionally smarter”.
In four years (the timeframe on which 4YFN is concerned) he expects that he will be “able to understand how I feel and what I want and have more notion of the context in which I am to behave in a way in my home. and another in the car or in the office” he said.
What is going on at the moment
At the moment and among other services, Alexa is able to read and respond to emails, play music or turn lights on and off using voice commands. Its creation is inspired by the Star Trek spacecraft, it uses “machine learning” technology to learn and its system operates in the cloud.
Also published on Medium.