For years, the advertising industry has been trying to figure out what to do with voice assistants, those disembodied helpers that were supposed to revolutionize commerce but have spent most of their existence setting kitchen timers and playing the wrong song.
Now Amazon, which has been quietly rebuilding its Alexa platform around artificial intelligence, is offering brands something that might have seemed like science fiction a decade ago: the ability to shape what the assistant actually says.
At the company's annual UnBoxed advertising conference in San Francisco this week, Amazon introduced what it is calling Branded Conversations, an ad format that lets marketers influence the responses consumers receive when they tap on prompts within Alexa for Shopping. The feature arrives several months after Amazon overhauled its voice assistant with Alexa+ and a revamped shopping experience in May.
Previously, when a shopper asked Alexa about a product, the assistant assembled its response from the advertiser's existing catalog and storefront on Amazon — a system that left brands with relatively little control over the conversation. Under the new format, advertisers can take a more active hand in crafting what users hear and see after clicking on a prompt.
Amazon did not immediately provide details on pricing or which brands might be first to test the format.
The announcement reflects a broader effort by the major technology platforms to find advertising models for AI-powered interfaces, which do not lend themselves easily to the banner ads and sponsored listings that have sustained the digital economy for two decades. (It turns out that a conversational assistant cannot simply pause mid-sentence to show you a rectangle.)
Whether consumers will welcome branded voices in their AI assistants remains to be seen. Then again, they have generally welcomed them everywhere else.
Original story published in adweek.com: "Advertisers Can Directly Influence Amazon’s Alexa Responses"