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Back in March, Amazon threw open its Alexa Voice Service, a personal digital assistant which works through the company’s Echo devices, to developers to enable them to incorporate Alexa’s voice-activated features in their respective apps. Thanks to Amazon’s decision, Alexa will be able to offer additional information from third party apps which will help you make decisions and manage your schedule. However, this isn’t exactly all that Amazon may be aiming to offer. As per recent reports, Alexa may soon be incorporated with push notifications- a feature which will enable the digital assistant to help users with information without requiring a voice command. These push notifications may include e-mail notifications, schedules of meetings, traffic conditions on the way to work and many other such notifications.
Through a press release in June, Amazon announced that Alexa could interact with a number of third party apps like Uber, Domino’s Pizza, FitBit, Kayak and Capital One to let you receive information from or work on these apps via the assistant without having to touch your phone. If push notifications are enabled and developers are able to integrate them to their apps, you may ask Alexa to order a pizza for yourself but the app will offer you regular updates like bill amount and time of delivery to keep you updated. While this will surely be a great feature as you will get all the relevant information without having to reach out for your smartphone, it may also turn out to be bothersome, especially if Alexa pesters you with e-mail and chat notifications when you’re trying to catch a quick nap.
There hasn’t been any official confirmation from Amazon on whether push notifications will indeed be integrated with Alexa, but if it does, it will be interesting to see if Echo devices will also allow users to turn off Push Notifications when they don’t need them. Alexa now boasts as many as 1,000 individual skills to compete with the likes of Siri and Cortana and to let you use it in as many ways as possible, so it’s importance as far as offering updates, getting things done and managing your schedule can not be underestimated, which is made evident by its success in just over a year post launch. With Apple’s Siri gaining new artificial intelligence features and Google’s Home Speaker gaining ground, the Push Notifications feature, depending on how useful it turns out to be for millions of users, could be a make or break venture for Alexa in the coming months it it does get announced.