Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa has been opened up to all developers to generate cash through add-ons and premium content in the virtual assistant’s ‘skills’.

In-skill purchasing will allow developers to charge for premium content and features within an Alexa skill, or enable subscriptions to premium content and features served up through the smart assistant.

There are currently over 40,000 skills for the smart assistant, all of which will remain free and allow the consumer to fully assess the quality of the skill before they purchase any extra features or content.

Amazon said developers will be able to use customers’ payment information from Amazon, so users can pay seamlessly via voice with Amazon Pay. 

«If you offer premium content, a customer can now ask to shop, buy, or agree to purchase suggestions made by your skill. Customers pay using Amazon’s simple voice purchasing flow using the payment options associated with their Amazon account. You define your premium offering and price, and we handle the voice-first purchasing flow,» explained Jeff Blankenberg, Alexa evangelist at Amazon. 

With this update, an Alexa skill can now pull payment and shipping information directly from Amazon, giving it the ability to take a cut of each sale while simultaneously discouraging users from leaving the Alexa interface to create an account with the third-party seller.

This new feature is similar to its e-commerce marketplace, where it serves as a technology and logistics platform for other retailers to sell products.

One of the first skills to use this capability is 1-800-Flowers, which asks that you turn on Amazon Pay in the Alexa app. After you select flowers, the app will offer two similar suggestions before asking for the name and address of the recipient.

Another announcement last week also opens the possibility for Amazon to expand its growing advertisement business into voice, by giving Alexa the ability to suggest skills when a user asks a question it can’t answer itself.

These new options are not Amazon’s first foray into rewarding developers for creating new skills for Alexa as the company already offers an Alexa Developer Rewards program. Creators of skills that drive high customer engagement are rewarded with cash incentives.

With the new year behind us, businesses are finalising their investment strategies for the year ahead, including confirming their IT spend. As is always the case at this time of year, we can expect both businesses and the channel to be inundated with marketing from vendors pushing new technologies like the cloud, IoT and AI, and making bold claims about how these technologies are going to revolutionise their industry.

While it’s an exciting time for any business that wants to stay ahead, seemingly disruptive technology integrations can be off-putting. For many organisations, the last thing they want is disruption and upheaval that might distract them from doing business.

Building a 2018 IT strategy that’s right for both the businesses and the channel

That doesn’t mean that the best approach for channel organisations and their customers is to simply stick to tried and tested, outdated technology and ignore the digital revolution that is going on around us.

There’s no denying that migrating to cloud communications provides a number of business benefits, such as increasing productivity, as well as helping businesses to meet the demands of the increasingly flexible workforce. Aside from enabling remote workers to seamlessly work from anywhere, anytime and on any device, a fully integrated cloud communications solution also empowers a business to be more nimble and reactive to changing demands. In particular, this allows organisations to deliver a greater customer experience to differentiate from the competition or simply stay in the game.

Simply overlooking any form of modernisation is a guaranteed way to get left behind, but it’s possible to future-proof businesses without taking a huge leap that’s as confusing for the reseller as it is for the business.

In many cases, channel partners are getting a hard-coded message: «You’re either in the cloud or you’re not». Yet the reality is much more measured. There are many opportunities to move into the cloud gradually with the right providers and the right strategy, and to educate customers about the right options for them along the way.

There’s no one size fits all approach to cloud

Organisations of different sizes and levels of IT maturity, or even different sectors require tailored cloud strategies. On a basic level, smaller organisations tend to have fewer barriers when it comes to moving to the cloud.

In contrast, large corporations are often faced with a more daunting task, which can involve moving on-premise implementations to cloud solutions within their overall corporate IT environment. On top of this, these businesses often have to deal with strict security requirements, regulation, or bricks-and-mortar infrastructure. In these cases, a public cloud solution may never be appropriate and a private or hybrid cloud solution is likely to be more suitable.

The speed at which an organisation wants to transition to the cloud, as well as the spread of the enterprise, will also influence the type of cloud strategy that fits the business. Those that operate globally have to ensure that this transition is smooth and consistent across locations. Hybrid cloud enables them to create a private cloud infrastructure, regionalising their implementation and serving a specified set of premises and remote workers within each country or regional entity.

The key point to remember is that the transition to cloud is an ongoing journey for many businesses, not an overnight switch. Resellers can take this same measured approach to offering cloud solutions. Their customers aren’t going to immediately throw their on-premise platforms out of the window, so resellers who are yet to embrace cloud still have an opportunity to be part of this journey with them.

Planning for success in 2018

The reality is that the priorities of the channel and their customers are in many cases aligned when it comes to cloud – while they are aware that the benefits of cloud cannot be ignored forever, they are understandably resistant to anything that will be overtly disruptive to their operations. Consequently, it’s important that a measured approach is taken on both sides – to ensure that the technology investment fits with the individual business’ needs and supports the business’ sustainability and growth.

It’s widely acknowledged that migrating to cloud communications is a powerful tool in breaking down borders, cutting costs and raising productivity – cloud adoption in the UK is now at 88%, according to the Cloud Industry Forum. As we head into 2018, there’s a real opportunity for the channel to work with clients to provide the support they need and advise them on their individual cloud journey.

Jeremy Butt is senior vice president EMEA at Mitel

Image: Shutterstock

Fitbit has announced plans to use Google’s Cloud Healthcare API to better connect user data with medical records, in a bid to provide enhanced levels of personalised patient care whilst at the same time broadening its own reach in the digital health and wearables space. 

The wearable fitness tracker manufacturer hopes to connect its devices to the electronic medical records (EMR) systems used by doctors and hospitals, with the aim of enabling healthcare practitioners to get health data straight from the patients’ device. 

«Over the past decade, we have built an incredible foundation as the leading wearables brand, helping millions of people around the world make lasting behavior changes that improve their health and wellness through fun and engaging experiences,» said James Park, co-founder and CEO of Fitbit.

«Working with Google gives us an opportunity to transform how we scale our business, allowing us to reach more people around the world faster, while also enhancing the experience we offer to our users and the healthcare system. This collaboration will accelerate the pace of innovation to define the next generation of healthcare and wearables.»

In addition, the two companies hope the collaboration will enable better management – by a patient and medical professionals working together using the information available –  of chronic healthcare issues such as diabetes and hypertension by making use of the cloud-based healthcare API and Fitbit’s Twine Health. 

Google’s cloud data storage platform is largely certified as complying with the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA), which regulates the use of medical records, which frees Fitbit from having to build its own system that complies with the law.

«At Google, our vision is to transform the way health information is organized and made useful,» added Gregory Moore MD, PhD, vice president, Healthcare, Google Cloud.

«By enabling Fitbit to connect and manage key health and fitness data using our Google Cloud Healthcare API, we are getting one step closer to this goal. Together, we have the opportunity to deliver up-to-date information to providers, enhancing their ability to follow and manage the health of their patients and guide their treatment.»

Following news of the deal, Fitbit’s shares rose five percent to close at $5,55 on Monday.

Amazon Web Services made up for 73% of the Seattle-based company’s overall profit in the first quarter of 2018.
In Amazon’s latest earnings for its 2018 first-quarter earnings, the company reported sales of $51 billion, up by nearly 43% year over year, and a net income of $1.6 billion.

In the first quarter of 2018 the company collected more than £550m a day in revenue from online retail and TV production.

But its cloud services outpaced Amazon’s overall growth with $5.4 billion in net sales, up 49% from the $3.7 billion reported for the same time last year. Those numbers translated into a healthy operating income of $1.4 billion for AWS.

AWS is still a relatively small part of Amazon’s overall business, but it is highly profitable for the company, contributing the lion’s share to the firm’s profits for the quarter. This is likely to the ever-marching increase in companies moving to the cloud and adopting cloud-based services that tap into AWS’ vast infrastructure.

AWS remains the market leader in terms of revenue generating more than $20 billion annually. They have expanded their cloud services with infrastructure in France, China and London and they continue to develop AI technologies, most notably with Alexa.

The results sent Amazon shares up to a new record high of 7% ($1,625) in the after-hours of trading, adding billions to the considerable fortune of its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos. In the report, Bezos cited the seven-year head start AWS over its rivals.

«AWS had the unusual advantage of a seven-year head start before facing like-minded competition, and the team has never slowed down,» he said. «As a result, the AWS services are by far the most evolved and most functionality-rich. AWS lets developers do more and be nimbler, and it continues to get even better every day.»

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The US Supreme Court has decided to drop a test case between Microsoft and the Department of Justice (DoJ), leaving a serious legal question about the reach of America’s Courts in the digital world.

In a case that had started in 2013, Microsoft refused to hand over emails stored in severs at the company’s data centre in Dublin that were subject to a warrant over a criminal investigation into alleged drug trafficking.

After decisions both in favour and against each party made in various courts, the case came to the Supreme Court to decide once and for all. But the Justices decided on Monday that the case was moot because of the new CLOUD Act passed into law by Congress last month.

The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act states that US companies are obliged to provide access to all content – whether held on a server in the US or outside the country – if they are issued with a warrant, but can reject such demands if they conflict with foreign laws, such as data protection legislation.

The DoJ immediately issued a new warrant to Microsoft in light of the law, which readily handed over the data, and both parties asked the Supreme Court to close the case, as no live dispute remained.

However, by closing the case, the Supreme Court avoided weighing in on the legal question of whether a company could refuse to comply with such a warrant due to it contradicting the local law where the data is stored.

After the Act had passed, US Senator Ron Wyden questioned the legitimacy of the bill given its rush through Congress, with the legislation attached to a huge spending bill document.

«This bill contains only toothless provisions on human rights that Trump’s cronies can meet by merely checking a box. It is legislative malpractice that Congress, without a minute of Senate debate, is rushing through the CLOUD Act on this must-pass spending bill,» he said.

Ocado Technology is fighting fraud with machine learning, improving its detection rate by 15 times since using automation to detect wrongdoing.

The technology division of the online supermarket has built its own machine learning-based algorithm with Google’s TensorFlow and Google Cloud to help it detect fraud among the sheer petabytes of data it stores in Google Cloud.

The system is part of the Ocado Smart Platform (OSP), and attempts to differentiate between shoppers who accidentally input the wrong personal details or who use an expired debit card, and those who have a malicious intent.

For Ocado, part of the danger of fraud is that leaving it unchecked could result in the fraudulent information being moved to other systems and divisions in the business, eventually impacting customer service.

This has led Ocado to develop a mechanism for predicting and recognising these incidents among millions of other normal events using data collected from past orders, as well as cases of fraud.

To do this, engineers have built a deep neural network using TensorFlow and uploaded the whole fraud detection system to the cloud.

«From the data we had collected from past orders, including cases of fraud, we created a list of features which included the number of past deliveries, the cost of baskets, and other information,» said Ocado’s Holly Godwin. «The more features we included in the training data, the more reliable the model could be, so we made sure that we were providing our model with as much information as possible.

«After collating our data, we then had to decide upon an algorithm capable of learning from the information. Eventually we implemented a deep neural network on TensorFlow, as it was precise and easy to deploy into production. Using TensorFlow was a natural choice as we had already made the move over to Google Cloud for data analytics so using TensorFlow alongside our data stored on the Google Cloud Platform worked well.»

The algorithm had to be as accurate as possible, because confirmed fraud cases are rare, typically one in every thousand orders (0.01%), and a machine learning model that is only 99.9% accurate could still miss several instances of fraud.

«The motivation behind using machine learning for fraud detection was twofold: speed and adaptability,» Godwin added. «Machines are fundamentally more capable of quickly detecting patterns compared to humans. Also, as fraudsters change their tactics, machines can learn the new patterns much quicker.»

Ocado’s push to include more features in the training data have created a more reliable model which has already achieved significant success, improving Ocado’s precision of detecting fraud by a factor of 15.