Amazon Pay is coming soon to apps developed for Amazon’s Alexa by third-party developers. That news comes care of Amazon’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas this week. Starting out, Alexa’s payment-embedded skills will fall into the following categories: donations, restaurants and event ticketing.
A developer preview made available yesterday also indicated that Alexa’s Amazon Pay-powered skills will expanded more dramatically in 2018. That change will roll out with a public beta for the Gadgets API, giving developers a chance to start making games that interact with the Echo Buttons for multi-person gameplay. Those will be in stores starting next month, according to reports. The new payments skill will likely leverage voice recognition technology, as Amazon has also announced that it will expand access to that capability as well. Presently, only Amazon-built Echo apps can use voice recognition.
Native payments for Alexa and Echo devices will allow Amazon to offer its 20+ thousand member developer base a chance to monetize their app creations. Thus far, so doing on the platform has been difficult as ads are mostly forbidden — with the exceptions of flash briefings and streaming audio, which are able to run ads.
PYMNTS.com is hosting the Voice Challenge with Alexa, and participating companies will have access to this SDK and private mentorship with Alexa developers. For more on how to participate, please click here.
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