Alexa, What Did Amazon Announce This Week?

I was in Seattle earlier this week for an Amazon event that over the space of an hour covered over 70 new devices, customer features, and developer tools across Alexa, Echo, and Fire TV.  Looking at the announcements overall I thought Amazon was trying to do a few things:

  • Appeal to both early tech adopters and mainstream consumers.
    • The needs of early adopters, who bought into the Alexa ecosystem and the voice-first UI early, are focused more in growing the number of products they own, as well as increasing the number of engagement points they have with them through skills. These are also users who have become highly dependent on Alexa, who now can operate even if the internet is down minimizing any negative feelings or frustration users might feel when they could not operate their smart home without an internet connection.

Published by

Carolina Milanesi

Carolina is a Principal Analyst at Creative Strategies, Inc, a market intelligence and strategy consulting firm based in Silicon Valley and recognized as one of the premier sources of quantitative and qualitative research and insights in tech. At Creative Strategies, Carolina focuses on consumer tech across the board. From hardware to services, she analyzes today to help predict and shape tomorrow. In her prior role as Chief of Research at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, she drove thought leadership research by marrying her deep understanding of global market dynamics with the wealth of data coming from ComTech’s longitudinal studies on smartphones and tablets. Prior to her ComTech role, Carolina spent 14 years at Gartner, most recently as their Consumer Devices Research VP and Agenda Manager. In this role, she led the forecast and market share teams on smartphones, tablets, and PCs. She spent most of her time advising clients from VC firms, to technology providers, to traditional enterprise clients. Carolina is often quoted as an industry expert and commentator in publications such as The Financial Times, Bloomberg, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. She regularly appears on BBC, Bloomberg TV, Fox, NBC News and other networks. Her Twitter account was recently listed in the “101 accounts to follow to make Twitter more interesting” by Wired Italy.