Amazon wants to own the IoT - and it's starting with soup
Amazon's Alexa isn't just its sassy retort to Siri but the retail behemoth's gateway to the smart home, and the starter is – perhaps fittingly – soup. Announcing the AWS IoT last week, a platform through which connected devices covering everything from home automation widgets, through cars, to industrial equipment can speak to Amazon's cloud, the company also quietly inked a reported deal with Campbell's.
That deal, a source speaking to AdWeek suggests, will see Alexa – the speaking assistant baked into Amazon's Echo – hook into Campbell's Kitchen, an online portal for recipes and information.
Although neither Amazon nor Campbell's have confirmed the integration, according to the leak the functionality will include spoken search for recipes, together with the option to either send that via email or, handy for the kitchen, read out the instructions.
It's unclear whether the two companies will also link the ability to order one or more items required from those recipes; currently, Alexa can reorder previously purchased items.
The broadening of Alexa's abilities – which began in earnest when Amazon opened up an SDK allowing third-party manufacturers to include the assistant in their own hardware – is only the tip of the retailer's IoT strategy, however.
The AWS IoT engine opens up the Amazon Web Services platform to the Internet of Things, with devices connecting to the cloud and triggering various actions depending on manufacturer and user preference. That could be logging of the use of industrial equipment along with service status, for instance, or flagging when a motion detector is tripped.
For low-power devices that might suffer if regularly pinged for their current status, Amazon creates "shadow" virtual versions, replicas in the cloud that mirror the physical device.
Connections between cloud and devices are encrypted and use mutual authentication, and Amazon has opted to use HTTP and Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) for intercommunication rather than a proprietary standard. Ten companies have weighed in with starter kits for companies hoping to bake AWS IoT into their own products.
Although Alexa's growing abilities will be the public-facing side of Amazon's IoT ambitions, just as AWS is the prime money-maker rather than Amazon retail, the big growth potential for Jeff Bezos & Co. may well be what goes in linking the increasingly connected devices in the background.
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