Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now
Amazon’s Alexa skills are now able to obtain information about a user’s location. Available today, the Device Address API gives skills developers the ability to factor location into services provided. The Device Address API is not a location tracker like GPS, but rather shares the address of the device owner.
“Your skill, for example, can deliver food and groceries to a customer’s home or provide directions to a nearby gym,” said Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg in a blog post today.
The default setting for skills will be to share no location data.
Permission to share a user’s postal code, country, or full address with a skill must be given inside the Alexa app, Blankenburg said. Device location settings can be found under Devices in the Settings area of the Alexa app.
AI Scaling Hits Its Limits
Power caps, rising token costs, and inference delays are reshaping enterprise AI. Join our exclusive salon to discover how top teams are:
- Turning energy into a strategic advantage
- Architecting efficient inference for real throughput gains
- Unlocking competitive ROI with sustainable AI systems
Secure your spot to stay ahead: https://bit.ly/4mwGngO
A skills analytics dashboard was also made available to the creators of Alexa skills today. The dashboard is able to track information like month-over-month skill adoption rates, total unique utterances, or the time of day users typically interact with a skill.
Last November, Alexa skills were also given a library of local business intent slots to facilitate local commerce.
Early users of the Device Address API include Real, a German chain store that gives users local news, discounts, and opening hours of nearby locations, along with Just Eat, which uses the API for food deliveries and AccuWeather, which uses the information for more accurate weather reports.
