In response to Google Home, Amazon enables Alexa Voice Service for developers

While Google recently attempted to make things difficult for Amazon Echo by launching its Home platform, the e-commerce giant has now planned to rival the Google project with its newest Alexa Voice Service (AVS) update. The Seattleheadquartered company has just enabled AVS for non-Alexa devices to encourage developers to test and enhance its platform.

Amazon has partnered with Sensory and KITT.AI, which enables the company to let developers test Alexa wakeup words on devices other than its Echo range of smart speakers. Software programmers can use this as an affordable solution on boards such as a Raspberry Pi to kick-start their developments for the Alexa assistant.

In addition to the original Alexa wakeup words, the integration of hotword detection engines from Sensory and KITT.AI lets developers build their own wakeup word-enabled Amazon Alexa model. This would help Amazon attract more developers and make iconic hotwords like ‘Hey Siri’ and ‘OK Google’ a thing of the past.

Notably, California-based Sensory already has a record of offering its machine learning techniques to Android OEMs like Motorola and Samsung to enable ‘OK Google’ and ‘Hey Galaxy’ hotwords on smartphones. KITT.AI, which focuses on natural language understanding (NLU) technologies, also enabled more than 2,000 developers to integrate over 1,000 unique hotwords using its Snowboy toolkit.

All this would give Amazon the power to enable some advanced voice recognition experiences for developers to compete against Google Home, which presently offers an Echo-like experience on a handful of devices.

Developers have already been provided with the updated AVS API to deliver the next-generation experience. Moreover, a GitHub repository is live with the

AVS sample app that you can install on your Raspberry Pi using a Java client and Node.js server.