Now, Amazon wants to help make it easier to actually use multi-assistant devices with the implementation of Universal Device Commands.

Other companies with similar setups include Sonos, which launched its own voice assistant last month. “We will have Alexa and their own assistant, called Hey Skullcandy, working simultaneously on these devices,” Rubenson said. That industry group has since grown to include more than 90 members, and multiple companies have launched devices capable of running more than one voice assistant concurrently.Īt Alexa Live, Amazon announced that Alexa would be coming to select Skullcandy headphones soon. A common language for voice assistantsĪmazon first threw its weight behind multi-assistant support in 2019, when it announced the Voice Interoperability Initiative with 35 member companies. For Amazon, providing this level of choice also means that Alexa is always part of the picture, which helps the company with its quest to turn ambient computing into a real business, complete with a large developer community tapping into multiple ways to monetize Alexa skills. “Customers win when they have choice,” said Alexa Voice Service VP Aaron Rubenson. The new feature will make it possible to use core smart speaker functionality across multiple assistants. To that end, Amazon is rolling out what it’s calling Universal Device Commands over the next year, the company announced at its Alexa Live developer event on Wednesday.

Now, it wants to help those assistants work together. Amazon has long championed the idea of running multiple voice assistants on the same device.

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