Amazon launches Alexa for Apps in fresh attempt to compete with Google Assistant, Siri

Amazon is making Alexa virtual assistant more dynamic and useful for its users. The company said it will soon allow Alexa to perform tasks on non-Amazon applications. The move is seen as Amazon’s efforts to help Alexa better compete with the likes of Google Assistant and Siri on iPhones.

Amazon has launched a new feature called Alexa for Apps which allows developers to integrate the voice assistant support. According to Amazon, the feature helps users to perform a variety of tasks. For instance, they can quickly begin searches with voice commands. They can view more and contextual information. Also, users can access any functionality on other applications.

With the availability of a preview version of Alexa for Apps, Amazon has bagged several third-party apps as early partners. This includes TikTok, Twitter, Yellow Pages, and Word Pop among others. In the case of TikTok, users can open the app, search, and navigate through voice commands. It will also support finding music and recording.

“Now you can enable mobile customers to quickly get to key content and functionality in your app, just by asking Alexa. It’s easy to add voice-powered deep links to your custom skill which connect to your iOS and Android apps,” said Amazon on its website.

For now, Alexa’s capabilities are mostly limited to Amazon’s Echo devices. Google and Apple, in the meantime, have worked to deepen virtual assistants’ integration with their mobile platforms. It’s quite difficult for a third virtual assistant to find a spot in the mobile segment as we’ve seen in the case of Microsoft’s Cortana and several others. The success of Alexa for Apps will depend on how fast the company can push the platform and is supported by third-party apps.