Amazon adds money making to Alexa skills

Alexa is opening up her sales talents to third-party skills, with the virtual assistant now supporting in-skill purchasing and Amazon Pay payments.

One of the first skills with this capability, 1-800-Flowers, asks that you turn on Amazon Pay in the Alexa app, and then gives two flower suggestions after querying about your relationship to the recipient and the occasion. For example, 1800 Flowers is using the feature to sell flowers to customers without forcing them to leave the voice experience in order to complete a payment. A merchant first registers with Amazon Pay to use Amazon Pay within their skill. If you speak English, live in the United Kingdom, and own an Alexa-powered device, you can ask it to Open Pac-Man Stories.

For customers, the experience is simple. "We are incredibly excited to collaborate with Amazon Alexa and work together on this first skill and we look forward to creating many unique stories in the future".

Lego claims it's teaching kids building, problem-solving, and roleplay skills, but we all know what's really going on here: It's teaching your kids to obey their robot overlords. Last week it launched an Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition for its U.S. userbase, filled with child-safe skills, and now it's rolling out similar skills for all UK Echo devices.

TuneIn, for instance, has been offering Echo users the option to add a TuneIn Live feature for a price, while The Ellen Show's skill offers Heads Up. The retailer already offers a separate Alexa Developer Rewards program enabling developers to sell real-world products, such as ordering food, and services, such as booking a ride.

To kick off today's launch of general availability, Amazon is announcing a handful of others who will do the same.

Similar to Apple's App Store, developers will make 70 percent of the price paid for by customers, with Amazon keeping the rest. "Initial consumer response has been good and provided many valuable insights, with an increasing number of new and repeated shoppers making purchases".

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