Amazon has been adding more skills to its popular voice assistant Alexa as the e-commerce giant looks to make the service more useful. In fact, the company’s senior vice president of devices, David Limp, revealed some of Alexa’s most popular skills on Tuesday while speaking at Coins2Day’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Colo.
Alexa can answer questions, turn on lights, order items like diapers, and even call an Uber directly through voice-controlled home devices Echo and Echo Dot as well as its streaming device, Fire TV. Users simply utter a command like, “Alexa, order an Uber to home.”
Limp revealed that ride sharing giants Uber and Lyft are among the most popular of the 1,400 skills—up from 1,000 in June—that Alexa now offers. Other popular skills include music streaming service Pandora and Spotify, as well some of the home automation skills, which allow people to turn off their lights and adjust their thermostats.
The tech giant announced on Tuesday that Alexa now boasts 1,400 skills—up from 1,000 skills in early June.
Limp added that making sure that Alexa is an open platform that other companies can build services on top of is critical for the future of the voice assistant. “The most important thing we have to do is creating self service APIs that allow people to enable any device or app with Alexa’s capabilities,” he said. “We want to create an open and neutral ecosystem for Alexa.”
Amazon is putting a lot of resources into Alexa and Echo as the company looks to fend off competition from Google and possibly Apple. Earlier this month, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos said that more than 1,000 people are working on Alexa’s technology (Limp confirmed this as well on Tuesday), and he believes Alexa will become the fourth pillar of Amazon’s business, adding to Amazon Prime, its cloud business Amazon Web Services, and its online retail marketplace.
