Amazon Unveils Initiative for Operating Voice Assistants on Single Device

Amazon.com is planning to roll out a product for using voice-assistants such as its Alexa, Microsoft Corp’s Cortana and others in a single device, Reuters reported on Wednesday. The e-commerce giant has been backed by many companies for the initiative.

The move comes at a time when the competition among branded tech players has been intensifying to seal the number one spot in the market for voice assistants, which are commonly housed in mobile devices and smart speakers.

Apple Inc’s Siri, Alphabet Inc’s Google Assistant and Samsung Electronics Co’s Bixby will not be included in the ‘Voice Interoperability Initiative’.

More than 30 companies including Salesforce.com’s Einstein will support the initiative. According to Amazon, the development of the hardware will be carried out by chipmakers such as NXP Semiconductors NV, MediaTek Inc, Qualcomm Inc, and Intel Corp.

The partnership will also be supported by companies such as Sony Audio Group, Sonos, Spotify, Baidu, Tencent, Bose, BMW, Orange, and Harman.

A source familiar with the matter said that the Washington-based e-commerce giant approached Google only over the weekend, giving it a very small time frame to evaluate the proposal.

Amazon and Microsoft have joined hands in the past. Two years ago, the two companies unveiled that their voice assistants will have the capability to communicate with each other, a unique move since a majority of the virtual assistants are known to extract data from their own ecosystem and not communicate to each other.