The e-commerce giant Amazon has teamed up with the notable smartphone manufacturing giant Motorola to provide the company’s voice-controlled assistant technology into most of the Motorola handsets in near future. During the keynote of the MWC 2017 event, the representatives of both Amazon and Motorola has announced this partnership and even demonstrated a small concept video in which a Moto handset is being connected to aHarman Kardon-made speaker Mod which also works as an Amazon Echo.
Dan Dery, the Vice-President of Motorola, commented in the press conference of the Mobile World Congress 2017 in Barcelona,“Later this year will see deep integrationof Alexa on Motorola smartphones with Alexa wake-up words. There won’t be any keys to press, no screen to unlock — you will simply talk to Alexa when the device is around.” Later he added,“This is going to be in most of our devices movingforward.”
Jon Kirk, thedirector Alexa voice services and Alexa skills has also joined Dery on the stage and talked about the importance of the third party partnerships. He also revealed that Alexa currently has more than10,000 featuresor ‘skills’ built bythird party developers which have really helped to improve thefunctionality of this voice-controlled virtual assistant.
Kirk also shed some lights on how excited the company is regarding this collaboration with Motorola and how this partnership will help the e-commerce giant’s vision for the service and how much “momentum” it will provide to the voice technology. Kirk also said that Amazon wants to “offer more choice” for how Alexacanbe used.
So how Alexa will work with the Moto mods? At the event, Dery demonstrated an upcomingmod concept for the modular designed Moto Z handset which will integrate Alexa, the voice assistant technology, encased in a bedside dock with the Harmon Kardon speakers embedded.
It is noteworthy that Motorola is not the first company to come with integrated Alexa in their smartphones. During the CES event, Huawei also announced the same for their mid-range smartphones. Google today has rolled out the Google Assistant to all the latest Google Android devices, but it seems like Motorola is more interested in incorporating Amazon’s Alexa than Google Assistant. The Alexa Moto Mod is expected to hit the market shelves later this year.
