Developers and businesses making skills for Amazon’s Alexa will soon be able to accept Amazon Pay and make purchases directly within voice apps from the Alexa Skills Store. The news was announced today during the Alexa State of the Union at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Other Alexa news shared today includes plans to bring Alexa to Australia and New Zealand in early 2018 and adding $100 million to the Alexa Fund for international investment.
Initial skills categories to accept Amazon Pay include donations, restaurants, and event ticketing.
Skills with plans to adopt one-time payments for premium content include Teen Jeopardy!, Sports Jeopardy!, Match Game, Heads Up, and HISTORY’s Ultimate History Quiz. A developer preview was made available today while other tools to enable transactions will be made more widely available early next year. Double Jeopardy! was one of the first skills to accept paid subscriptions. Millions has been doled out this far to developers in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, and today the program was extended to developers in Australia, Japan, India, and Canada.
Other changes on the way for the makers of Alexa skills in early 2018 include a public beta for the recently announced Gadgets API so they can start making games that interact with Echo Buttons for multi-person gameplay that go on sale next month.
Alexa skills developers accepting payments will likely take advantage of the ability to understand unique voices, a feature that started bringing personalization to Alexa users this fall and extended the service to developers Tuesday.
Native payments for Alexa skills precede a series of recent efforts by Amazon to pay the makers of Alexa skills. Starting this spring and expanded this summer, Amazon began to pay developers based on the level of engagement a skill is able to produce.
Skills like flash briefings and streaming audio are still able to run advertisements, but ads are otherwise forbidden for Alexa developers.