Dive Brief:
- American Express, the payment card service with 110 million cardholders worldwide, created a skill for Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant. Eligible card members who link their Amex account to Alexa can now use voice commands to check their account balance, review recent charges or make a payment, the company said in a statement.
- The new skill also connects with Amex Offers, the card company’s loyalty program that provides discounts on shopping, dining and entertainment. In 2010, Amex first allowed cardholders to use reward points for purchases on Amazon, said Luke Gebb, senior vice president of enterprise digital at Amex.
- Amex’s eligible card members can enable the skill in the Alexa app for iOS and Android or on alexa.amazon.com. Once the skill is enabled, accounts can be accessed by saying “Alexa, open Amex.”
Dive Insight:
Amazon said Alexa now has more than 12,000 skills and that new ones are added every day, reminiscent of the early days of the App Store. Unfortunately, many of the skills look like they were created for a high school computer science class. Among the 280 skills listed in Alexa’s business and finance section, there is the “Mark Cuban Quotes” skill that reads from a random list of sayings by the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and another one that provides foreign exchange information for Bitcoin.
However, skills like the Amex one could prove useful for consumers looking to quickly complete everyday tasks like reviewing recent charges without having to sit down at a laptop or pick up a phone. It will be skills like this that will help Amazon turn Alexa into a strong ecosystem capable of attracting consumers and fighting off competitive moves by Apple's Siri and Google Assistant.
Perhaps the most useful skill is the one that Amazon added last week: the ability to make phone calls and send messages between Alexa-enabled devices for free, including smartphones that have the iOS or Android app. Later this summer, Alexa is set to be able to handle messaging among voice-enabled devices in the home, making it like an intercom system.
Amazon is adding video capabilities to its Echo devices with the pending release of the Echo Show. The new gadget supports video capabilities on a 7-inch touchscreen that takes up more than half of the roughly square-shaped device, according to an article by Mobile Marketer's sister site Retail Dive. The Echo Show will be released on June 28 for $229.99, but was available for pre-order starting on Tuesday.
