On Thursday, the Seattle web retailer announced three initiatives to support its Alexa voice service and accompanying wireless personal assistant, Amazon Echo, including a software development kit and a $100 million fund to back engineers focused on building experiences around human speech.

Amazon’s encouragement of engineers to develop for and around its voice service program comes two days after it made Echo, a wireless speaker that can respond to basic vocal commands, publicly available for purchase. Though reviews for the product and its core Alexa voice technology have been mixed, Amazon is looking to speed up the adoption of its technology and allow for quicker improvements by opening up to developers.

“Experiences designed around the human voice will fundamentally improve the way people use technology,” said Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in a statement. “Since introducing Amazon Echo, we’ve heard from developers, manufacturers, and start-ups of all sizes who want to innovate with this new technology. With the Alexa Fund, we want to empower people to explore the boundaries of voice technology.”

While voice-based technology has already been a key feature in many electronic devices, there is room for improvement. Users complain all too often that Siri, Apple's mobile-based vocal assistant, is not able to act beyond basic requests and often lacks the ability to comprehend the nuances of language and speech. Google and Microsoft have their own personal assistants in Google Now and Cortana, respectively, while there are a number of startups like Hound that are also looking to solve the speech problem.

Amazon, which has had issues with the adoption of past consumer electronics gadgets like its ill-fated Fire Phone, is hoping that attracting developers and opening up its core Alexa technology will give it an edge over its tech rivals. Its Alexa Skills Kit will allow developers to incorporate already existing programs into the voice technology, allowing a hobbyist coder, says Amazon, the ability to ask their Echo to water their lawn if they have a web-connected sprinkler system or find their child’s online school lunch menu. The development kit already has a number of early adopters including AOL, Intuit and StubHub, which is owned by Amazon-competitor eBay.

Even more important, however, is Amazon’s opening of Alexa to other hardware products. By uncoupling the technology from the Echo speaker, Amazon is encouraging hardware developers to make Alexa their vocal platform of choice. A car manufacturer will now be able to make Alexa the core personal assistant, while any third-party television can now be built with Alexa voice-operated commands.

“We’ve made adding Alexa incredibly easy for developers–any device with a speaker, an Internet connection, and a microphone can integrate Alexa with just a few lines of code,” said Greg Hart, the head of Amazon Echo and Alexa Voice Services, in a statement.

The Alexa Fund caps off Amazon’s push into voice and was announced with seven initial investments. The company says it will invest up to $100 million to “start ups of all sizes” and focus on backing companies that develop Alexa-focused hardware and features, as well as entrepreneurs examining natural language understanding and automatic speech recognition.

(Credit: Web)