Amazon expands Alexa Voice Service to Germany and the U.K.

The Alexa Voice Service (AVS), which allows device manufacturers to install Alexa inside their products, is now available in the United Kingdom and Germany, Amazon announced today.

Amazon first made the AVS available to developers in the U.S. in June 2015. Going beyond smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, it has been used to place Alexa inside Sonos speakers, Raspberry Pi, Ford vehicles, a Huawei smartphone, a home robot, and a can of Pringles.

The AVS facilitates many services, like ordering Amazon products, searching Wikipedia, creating custom commands with IFTTT, or using more than 8,000 Alexa skills.

“Now your end customers can speak with Alexa and receive responses and content in their preferred language and region,” Ted Karczewski, with the Alexa Voice Service team, wrote in a blog post.

Traffic reports, Kindle book reading, and iHeart Radio are not yet available in the United Kingdom and Germany, Amazon says.

Soon joining the race to put assistants inside mass manufactured devices are competitors Google Assistant and Cortana. Microsoft and Google plan to launch software development kits like AVS later this year.

For its part, Google Assistant will be integrated to connect with Hyundai cars, Android TVs, and next month the Samsung S8 smartphone. Google Assistant in Allo is now able to speak German, Hindi, Hinglish, and Brazilian Portuguese in the Allo chat app.

Last December, Microsoft announced plans to launch a Cortana software development kit, an Amazon Echo competitor by Harman Kardon, and a Cortana Skills Kit (coming later this month), starting with skills from companies like Expedia and Capital One.