Amazon has decided to remove paid perks for Alexa developers. The company confirmed to Engadget on Wednesday that it will end the Alexa Developer Rewards program at the end of June. At the same time, a second program will be completed that rewards developers for using Amazon Web Services as the backend for their Alexa apps.
With the advent of generative AI, the breakthrough voice assistant’s third-party apps (“skills”) no longer seem to be the company’s focus. The news was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed with the company by Engadget.
Amazon described the move as a case of phasing out an old project that had run its course. “These are older programs that were launched back in 2017 to help newer developers interested in building skills accelerate their progress,” an Amazon spokesperson wrote to Engadget. “Today, customers have over 160,000 skills available to them, a well-established Alexa developer community, and new LLM-based tools that will help developers build new experiences for Alexa. Those older programs just ran their course, so we decided to discontinue them.”
The company told me that the program was launched when developers were still learning to build voice apps and that it was intended to get them started. Amazon told Engadget that less than one percent of developers used the program. It said Alexa developers continue to be paid for in-app purchases using their Alexa skills, adding that the cost of producing them has fallen while developers’ knowledge has increased.
The Alexa Developer Rewards program was created to incentivize developers who bring high-quality skills to the assistant. Launched in 2017, when Alexa was all the rage, the program paid rewards to developers for skills that met engagement thresholds in certain categories. It was part of Amazon’s push to turn Alexa Skills into a booming app store for a new generation of voice-first devices – a vision that was never fully realized.
Renewed interest in AI assistants is now turning to generative AI, which can handle many of the same tasks as Alexa’s abilities (probably much better in some cases). At its fall 2023 device event, Amazon previewed a next-generation version of Alexa with ChatGPT-like generative AI capabilities. The company has also gradually integrated next-generation technology into its seller tools and product pages.
Bloomberg reported that Amazon wasn’t making much money from third-party apps (which isn’t surprising given today’s news). The company cut the funding available for Alexa developer payments in 2020. Amazon also laid off several hundred employees in its Alexa department at the end of last year. Meanwhile, Google has long since thrown in the towel: in 2022, third-party voice apps for Google Assistant will be completely phased out.