Pets are people, too. Well, at least as far as Alexa’s concerned.
Amazon recently announced a new “Petlexa” feature available on all smart speaker hardware products running Alexa. In a nutshell, the Petlexa feature allows dogs, cats and other common household pets to communicate with the voice-enabled AI virtual assistant just like human consumers do.
Petlexa gives pets the freedom to order their food from Amazon — a fast-growing marketplace for dogs, cats and even hamsters.
An Amazon study found that 71.9 percent of pet orders on Alexa were for dog food. Cats took up 26.4 percent of the pet food ordering volume on Alexa. Hamster food, meanwhile, made up 0.04 percent of all pet food orders on Alexa.
Additionally, Petlexa allows pets to activate smart home-enabled toys, play their favorite Spotify playlists and control connected entertainment to watch their favorite animal films.
How it works is a bit complicated to explain. Luckily, Amazon has released an informative promotional video:
Pet owners can ask, “Alexa, what is Petlexa?” for additional information.
Amazon’s Alexa sure has come a long way in the past few years.
Just last summer, consumers’ minds were blown when Alexa reached 1,000 unique skills. If they could see us now … because Alexa’s now got well over 10,000 human-enabled skills and a handful of pet-related skills to boot.
Amazon plans to roll out functionalities for additional pets in the coming months, including various popular types of rodents, lizards and birds.
This story was written as part of PYMNTS Annual April Fool’s edition and all in the spirit of good fun. Any resemblance to real news is purely coincidental. We hope you enjoyed it.
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