The article says that the Alexa economy is increasingly important to Amazon, yet if you go on the developer boards, most of the complaints from last year are st

The article says that the Alexa economy is increasingly important to Amazon, yet if you go on the developer boards, most of the complaints from last year are still there. The flaws in the system keep serious developers away. Those on Hacker News might remember this conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 It's also disappointing how much of this system remains vaporware: https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-ces-2016-takeover-smart-home https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-ces-... It's also disappointing that Amazon continues to resist the changes necessary to make the Alexa a good Enterprise eco-system: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-primarily-succeed-in-business-settings-not-in-home-settings http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-pr... On this last point, it is frustrating that we have not seen more competition. Most startups lack the resources to build their own voice system, so they want to build on the back of service being offered by Amazon or Apple or ... Apple promised to open Siri, but so far you can't build Enterprise apps with Siri. There is interest among managers. Among the ideas that business leaders have asked me about: 1. An Amazon Alexa in every hotel room, ready to answer guests questions 2. A salesperson leaves a meeting where they made a sale. They get in their car and drive home. They talk to their ______ device and all of the data is sent to Salesforce, the app creating a new Opportunity or new Tasks. 3. An Amazon Alexa skill that can reach into the companies Salesforce account and generate a report for high level executives Of this last one, we had a working demo in early 2016, but we need some extra tools for specifying the phonetic sound of a company name, as Alexa mangles the names of companies such as IBM and CNET. As to #2, we worked on a text interface for Salesforce in 2015. I wrote about that extensively here: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09... We then investigated how to do this with voice. At the moment, it seems the best option is to use voice-to-text on an iPhone or Android. It's an open question whether it is best to use IBM Watson's NLP tools or build a specialized tool just for dealing with Salesforce.