Today during an event focused on Alexa developer and partner news, Amazon announced new features and integrations, including a collection of APIs and software development kits (SDKs) aimed at making Alexa more versatile. They come a month after the company demoed forthcoming and experimental Alexa features at its annual re:Mars conference in Las Vegas, including the ability to synthesize short audio clips into longer speech.
A highlight of today’s event was the previewing of Amazon’s Universal Device Commands (UDC) and Agent Transfers (AT), a pair of technologies intended to simplify the task of interacting with multiple voice assistants on the same device. On devices that support Alexa and another voice assistant, like Sonos’ Sonos Voice Control, UDCs will let users say commands (e.g., “Turn up the volume”) using compatible wake words (e.g., “Hey, Sonos”), even if the target assistant wasn’t originally …
