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Today, smart home devices including speakers are becoming a household accessory in America. Amazon Echo and Google Home speakers can be found in many homes, entertaining both adults and kids.
Last quarter, the market size of smart home speakers grew by 30 percent. According to a report published by CIRP, the number of installed Amazon Echo speaker devices is 20 million units and Google Home devices is 7 million units. Last quarter, 7 million smart speakers were sold in the USA.
Smart home speakers Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Harman Kardon Invoke speakers are powered by AI-assistants Alexa, OK Google, and Microsoft Cortana respectively.
Amazon Alexa is the AI-assistant behind tens of millions of devices like the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Show. Alexa provides capabilities, or skills, that enable customers to create a more personalized experience. There are now more than 25,000 skills from companies such as Starbucks, Uber, and Capital One as well as other innovative designers and developers.
Since the launch of Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Amazon’s Alexa, the voice enabled apps have become a common interface for consumers to interact with devices including internet searches.
Today, 40% of adults use voice search and Apple’s Siri is used by 41.4 million monthly. Microsoft Cortana, the intelligent assistant on Windows 10 has 133 million monthly users. The numbers are expected to grow a lot. According to a research, by 2020, 30% of searches will be done without a screen. Smart homes devices in the USA are expected to grow to 244 million by 2022.
Based on all this research and these numbers, obviously, there will be a need for AI-assistant developers.
Alexa Skills Kit
The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that makes it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa. ASK enables designers, developers, and brands to build engaging skills and reach customers through tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. With ASK, you can leverage Amazon’s knowledge and pioneering work in the field of voice design.
Get started here: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit
Google Assistant SDK
The Google Assistant SDK lets you add hotword detection, voice control, natural language understanding and Google’s smarts to your devices. Your device captures an utterance (a spoken audio request, such as "What's on my calendar?"), sends it to the Google Assistant, and receives a spoken audio response in addition to the raw text of the utterance.
Get started here: https://developers.google.com/assistant/sdk/
Cortana Skills Kit
Cortana is a digital assistant that keeps users informed and productive, helping them get things done across devices and platforms. Skills define the tasks that Cortana can accomplish. Cortana invokes the skills based on spoken input from the user. You can extend Cortana by adding your own skills that let your users use Cortana to interact with your service.
To extend Cortana, use the Cortana Skills Kit. The kit is a suite of tools that help you build skills that connect users to your custom services and solutions.
Get started here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/cortana/skills/overview