Amazon has been at the forefront of digital innovation for over two decades. One reason behind its success is quite obvious from its mission statement — to be customer obsessed and not competitor obsessed. With Amazon, the services need to be deployed at very large scale. For which it uses the widely popular Amazon web services.
Along with its in-house tech innovation, Amazon also possesses a rich database of user inputs.
Amazon’s recommendation engine like any other recommendation platform relies heavily upon the choices made by the user to run its e-commerce platforms.
Amazon’s Alexa, for example, relies heavily on natural language tasks for improving itself. Since human language is too complicated to understand just from the audio, it trains on continuous audio inputs from various contextual real-world scenarios.
Instead of waiting for some trivial scenario to happen, Amazon encourages the public to help develop skills of Alexa. In fact, they have incentivised these contributions with rewards and prize money such as Alexa developer programme.
This rewards programme was started in countries like the US, UK and Germany. Having garnered some success, Amazon now launches its developer program in India.
What’s In It For The Developers
Alexa rewards program offers a lucrative deal for the developers across the world to earn money for teaching skills that improve customer engagement.
Skill categories include:
- Education and Reference;
- Food and Drink;
- Games, Trivia and Accessories;
- Health and Fitness;
- Kids, Lifestyle;
- Music and Audio; and Productivity.
Developers can increase their level of skill engagement and potentially earn more by improving their skill, building more skills, and making their skills available worldwide.
Not only can developers make money, but they can also save money too with AWS promotional credits. These credits can help you build and host your Alexa skills for free.
Alexa developers can build and host most Alexa skills for free using Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Alexa skill developers can take advantage of the AWS Free Tier, which offers one million AWS Lambda requests and up to 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) compute time per month at no charge.
Developers with a published Alexa skill can apply to receive a $100 AWS promotional credit, and in subsequent months may be eligible to receive an additional $100 per month in AWS promotional credits.
How Can One Bag The Rewards
The advantage of this program is not only that Amazon pays the developer for improving skills but allows the developer to use the in-house technologies. Here are a few tools and services that the developers can exploit:
- Amazon’s Machine Learning tools allow the developer to create models without the need to learn complex algorithms. These models help provide content personalization, surface recommendations, or perform trained behaviours for the skill.
- Other services include vision-recognition APIs like Amazon Rekognition, a deep-learning image analysis service,
- This helps in developing skills to enhance home automation.
- Storing data in Amazon DynamoDB enables the developer to give and memory and context to the skill under development. This helps in teaching tasks where there are time outs and completion of interaction cycles.
- One of the most engaging skills, like Ambient Noise and RuneScape Quests – One Piercing Note, include audio sounds, voiceovers, and sound effects that make the in-game experience more immersive.
- This can be done incorporating audio files via Amazon S3 to stream short audio bursts, games, podcasts, or news stories to the skill.
- You can incorporate AWS IoT and SQS to send messages to websites or a user’s device like a phone, VR, mobile app, or appliance and integrate that device into your skill.
- Whereas, Amazon Cognito avoids the need for having back-end as it takes care of authentication and device syncing.
- Integrating with Cloudfront to cache dynamic content and files can improve response time and deliverability.
- Amazon Quicksight helps to visualise analytics to keep a track of skill performance in Redshift and fix the issues that don’t align with the interests of the users.
The growing use of home-pods and speech assistants have attracted tech-giants across the world. And with its rewards program, Amazon plans to be at the top of its game. This program will introduce more Indians to the world of voice intelligence and the science behind the NLP for machines.
