Amazon Alexa ‘Asks The Audience’

Amazon has launched an invite-only program that asks customers to submit answers to Alexa’s more difficult questions.

According to a report, Amazon has been internally testing the program, dubbed Alexa Answers, adding more than 100,000 responses in the past month. Now it’s opening up the program to select members of the public. Those who are asked to join via email can answer questions for Alexa via a website hosting a broad range of topics.

In addition, the eCommerce giant announced that it is releasing a new set of features that make chatting with Alexa easier for Amazon Music customers. In fact, Amazon Music customers and Alexa will be able to engage in back-and-forth conversations to select playlists, and users will be able to tell Alexa which songs they like or dislike.

The company added that Alexa can find playlists by mood, tempo, genre or occasion. After the initial voice command, the voice assistant responds with follow-up questions to customize the user’s selection.

“It’s a paradigm shift because you’re getting into conversations,” said Kintan Brahmbhatt, director of product for Amazon Music. “Before, customers would ask Alexa to do something and Alexa would respond with music. Today, we’re shifting into deep personalization, and Alexa will have an interactive conversation with the customer.

“The vision and the mission is to provide a very magical and simple customer experience when it comes to discovering music and enjoying music,” Brahmbhatt added.

Other than Amazon Music, it was revealed last month that Pandora is now allowing Pandora Premium subscribers to stream music through Amazon Echo devices and third-party speakers with Alexa built in. Users can stream songs, full albums and playlists from Pandora’s on-demand service to Echo devices, as well as set Pandora as the default music library on their Alexa-powered device. Currently, Apple Music, YouTube Music and Google Play Music are the few music streaming services that don’t support Alexa.