NBC Universal Media Labs and SyFy connected their shows to the Alexa service through SyFy’s Innovation Lab, where questions were developed for several of its shows. The offer for the final consumer includes behind-the-scenes previews, schedules, and episode information with Alexa’s services.
Alexa is a voice service created by Amazon, that works as a responsive assistant that recognizes the user’s voice. It is mostly like an artificial intelligence system that provides voice-recognition and responsive data to the commands.
The interesting thing is that Alexa is the first voice service that is available to developers of products that use microphone and/or speakers in order to offer to their customers the voice-recognition service.
How and why?
SyFy decided to integrate their data to a voice service like Alexa in order to enhance the user experience, giving them the possibility to interact with the shows asking questions that are going to be answered by an artificial intelligence system. Information regarding the SyFy selected shows will be available to Alexa users even before they get aired on television.
Amazon, on the other hand, pointed out that many of their customers are science-fiction fans, so they think that is going to be a very successful project since a lot of content will be available to them, including when the SyFy show is coming on, what happened in previous episodes and other information related to the episodes, all using the Alexa voice service, that will respond like a personal assistant.
Users, however, will have to have an Alexa-powered device in order to enjoy the new features, but SyFy (and NBC) is probably the first channel that is creating alliances with tech-initiatives in order to enhance the user experience. The main goal of the channel is to enrich the viewing experience using different “tech-niques”.
Alexa is one of these, but SyFy has also established 3D printing and integrating the Internet of Things, among other projects, as the best way to integrate the tv shows into the daily routine of science-fiction fans. For the Innovation Lab, being available on Alexa-enabled devices is the way to show consumers the deep interest of the channel into putting the viewer experience forward.
Source: Tech Times