What's next for Alexa?

Last week’s CES was abuzz with upcoming new experiences for voice enabled services. While Microsoft and others scored a few wins, it was Alexa that had the most buzz and you can read a selection of the announcements here. Many are gimmicky, but others will offer genuine usefulness, and will bring the connected home (a concept which up until now has been largely ignored by mainstream consumers) a lot nearer to reality.  Now we just need some supported services here in Asia. With all of that in mind, here’s my own personal wish list for Alexa this year

Get reminders sorted

Number one on my near-term wish list. It seems bizarre and a big miss not be able to do reminders. You can do appointments, you can do countdowns, alarms and to-do’s, but you can’t set Alexa to remind you to do something, at a certain time. Siri manages this, although she only flashes up a text notification once the reminder is triggered. I’d like Alexa to say “Matt. Buy Nikki’s birthday present” at a pre-determined time, and repeat at a user defined interval (or say it once until I dismiss, or have a persistent Alexa app notification like Siri). This would open-up a world of new use cases. One of them could be to set up vocalised activity reminders for children (homework time or sports practice) or pill reminders for elderly parents. 

Make the flash briefing more useful. 

This has got great potential, but even in the UK this is pretty limited currently. You get Sky news, and a Radio 4 podcast, but then it basically reverts to reading out news headlines in a robotic way. My want list - as well as many more local information sources (see Asia content), I’d like to have Alexa read my day’s schedule, my reminder’s or To-dos.

Mobile phone integration

Mobile may be a way off, as with this Alexa would step deep into Siri and iOS territory. But that doesn’t stop me wishing for the day where I can use Alexa, and not Siri, to find a contact from my iOS device, and call them while on speaker. And with Echo’s excellent wide array microphone, I wouldn’t be tied to having to be close to it, I could just carry on a conversation from the other side of the room.          

Music – deeper third party support and digital out please

I love using music with Alexa, as interaction with music a great use case for voice. Commands, like play, stop, skip are concise, unambiguous, and easy to use. Playlists are normally uniquely named, making even more complex music choices straight forward for voice interaction to satisfy. Integration of music services like Spotify and Tidal, and of course Amazon’s own Music services take a couple of minutes to set-up via the app. Where Echo needs a real beef up though is on the hardware side. 

First off, there is no digital out, so if you want to take a pure digital feed straight into an external DAC you can’t. You’re basically stuck with an analogue out and digital conversion done within Echo. At Echo’s price point that invariably means compromises, with a pretty un-interesting flat analogue signal. That’s more than adequate for casual music listeners, but less so for audiophiles, or to users of Tidal looking to unlock a higher bit rate music stream.    Secondly, Echo’s own speakers, are great, and as good or better than many Bluetooth speakers, but compared to Sonos and others, they sound a little boxy. 

Give it six months it’s going to be a different story. The Alexa integration into Sonos is just around the corner, and since Sonos does offer direct digital out through Sonos Connect, there’s an easy way of getting Alexa to play with both Sonos dedicated speakers, and into higher end hi-fi set-ups. And there is about to be a plethora of Alexa speaker hardware choices from a variety of vendors. Looking a bit further out, I’d also love to see native support for Alexa in streamers from the likes of Naim and Linn. One other thing on my audio wish list, get Echo Dot enabled with digital out, so I can easily plug it straight into a higher quality music streamer like Naim’s outstanding Uniti range

Asia – my content and services wish list

Right now Echo is not officially available in Asia, and at the time of writing you can’t ship it in direct, so there hasn’t been a great impetus for third party support here. That could quickly change as Amazon looks to ramp up it’s operations from Singapore, and hopefully launch a fully-fledged Amazon service here in Asia. Four things top of my Asia wish list –

1.      Alexa, call a cab (literally) with Grab – when we’re leaving our apartment, we’re normally scrabbling for keys, bags, wallets and mobile. I don’t want to faff around with an app when I’ve already got my hands full,  I just want to say ‘Alexa Grab taxi now’, and then have her tell me when it’s arrived downstairs.

2.      Alexa book me a restaurant with HungryGoWhere – my favourite Singapore food service (well I did spend five years of my life helping build it so bit biased) – and it would only take three or four lines of voice command to do a booking. Biggest challenge is going to be restaurant names (many are in local language, have duplicate names or have strange spellings) and the ability to find an open slot

3.      Alexa – give me a news and travel flash for Singapore -  Channel News Asia would be a great addition to the service, plus local weather, MRT and general travel information, from MediaCorp and other leading local information providers

4.      Alexa, check my SQ booking – as a frequent flyer, I’ve love to double checking on my flight time, terminal and any delays, while I’m packing. On-line check in by voice would be a logical next step to this too

So that’s my wish-list for Alexa, and doubtless there will be many amazing experiences that are just but a glint in a developers eye right now. What’s on your wish list for Alexa this year?