Watch all the Transform 2020 sessions on-demand here.
Amazon’s Alexa skills are now able to obtain information about a user’s location. Available today, the Device Address API gives skills developers the ability to factor location into services provided. The Device Address API is not a location tracker like GPS, but rather shares the address of the device owner.
“Your skill, for example, can deliver food and groceries to a customer’s home or provide directions to a nearby gym,” said Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg in a blog post today.
The default setting for skills will be to share no location data.
Permission to share a user’s postal code, country, or full address with a skill must be given inside the Alexa app, Blankenburg said. Device location settings can be found under Devices in the Settings area of the Alexa app.
June 5th: The AI Audit in NYC
Join us next week in NYC to engage with top executive leaders, delving into strategies for auditing AI models to ensure fairness, optimal performance, and ethical compliance across diverse organizations. Secure your attendance for this exclusive invite-only event.
A skills analytics dashboard was also made available to the creators of Alexa skills today. The dashboard is able to track information like month-over-month skill adoption rates, total unique utterances, or the time of day users typically interact with a skill.
Last November, Alexa skills were also given a library of local business intent slots to facilitate local commerce.
Early users of the Device Address API include Real, a German chain store that gives users local news, discounts, and opening hours of nearby locations, along with Just Eat, which uses the API for food deliveries and AccuWeather, which uses the information for more accurate weather reports.
