Amazon has announced a new set of device manufacturer capabilities that will bring Alexa Routine support to 3rd-party Alexa devices. Alexa Routines allow customers to automate a series of actions using a single voice command. The new options available to manufacturers will not only allow non-Amazon made Alexa devices to run Alexa Routines, but they’ll also now be available to select as the “Alexa will respond from” device in the Alexa app. No support from 3rd-party manufacturers has been announced yet, but you can probably expect devices like the Eufy Genie, Ecobee 4, and Sonos One to add these new Alexa capabilities soon.

Amazon has announced a new development kit that will make it easier for manufacturers of devices like watches and headphones to incorporate access to Alexa. Before today, if a device maker wanted to give their customers access to Alexa, they had to include all necessary Alexa communication components directly in the device or come up with some proprietary way to remotely access Alexa. The new Alexa Mobile Accessory Kit, as it’s being called, makes it possible for the Alexa app on a mobile device to act as a gateway to Alexa for a third-party device. A device using the new portable access option would connect to the Alexa app via Bluetooth and have full access to Amazon’s voice assistant. Bose, Jabra, iHome, Beyerdynamic, Bowers and Wilkins, Linkplay, SUGR, and Libre Wireless have already committed to bringing an Alexa-on-the-go experience to their Bluetooth audio-capable products this year.

Amazon has introduced a new simpler way for third-party Alexa device manufacturers to allow users to link those devices with their Amazon accounts. The new system, called Code-Based Linking, allows customers to register Alexa devices by simply entering a unique code on a secondary device, such as a mobile phone. This will allow Alexa to more easily be integrated into devices that don’t have keyboards or other user input methods. Read more ›

Amazon’s Echo devices are generally very good at picking out their wake word. This is because, while it’s the device itself that locally identifies that the word has been said, Amazon still verifies after the fact that the wake word was said using their much more powerful cloud servers. Now that same cloud-based wake word verification feature is being made available to 3rd-party Alexa devices. This means non-Amazon made devices with far-field always-listening Alexa capabilities will become as good as Amazon’s own devices at picking out the wake word. Read more ›

Amazon already makes the software behind Alexa available to any device manufacturer, through their Alexa Voice Service (AVS) development kit, but now they’re making the Echo hardware available too. Amazon today announced that device manufacturers wanting to add Alexa capabilities can have access to their “high-performance far-field microphone array and voice processing technology.” The hardware-based reference solution includes the same 7-microphone array found in Echo products, wake word recognition, beamforming, noise reduction, and echo cancellation.

This will make it easier for new devices to be created by third-parties with the same always-listening capabilities of the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, as long as those manufactures include Alexa. Most Alexa implementations require the user to press a button first, but soon we should start seeing more hands-free devices emerge. The hardware dev kit is available to OEMs through an invite-only program.