Amazon will let devs compete for your Echo Show’s screen and everything else Alexa just added - The Verge

Today, Amazon is announcing it’s going to give more of those opportunities to third-party developers — including brand-new widgets and featured skill cards that might take up a chunk of your smart speaker’s precious real estate.

Here’s what to expect from those and everything else the company’s announcing at its Alexa Live event today.

One of the first featured skill cards will be Comedy Central, and Rubenson says he might well see it because he already listens to some comedy in his Alexa Flash Briefing each morning.

While Amazon was the only one that previously profited from physical merchandise sold through Alexa, the company will now let Alexa skill developers sell products inside their skills as well with Alexa shopping actions and get up to a 10 percent affiliate marketing commission from Amazon, too.

Rubenson says Samsung will have a fridge with both Bixby and Alexa “operating side by side,” and the company’s Alexa Custom Assistant (which lets brands create their own Alexa-powered assistant) will appear in a Verizon smart display where Alexa can handle standard Alexa tasks while the new Verizon assistant can handle requests like checking your wireless bill.

The new features are all coming as part of the company’s Alexa Live developer conference today, where it’s seeking to attract the next generation of programmers to build skills for its voice assistant

Amazon says it now has 900,000 registered developers and 130,000 skills (up from 750,000 developers a year ago and 100,000 skills in September 2019), and Rubenson tells us developer revenue has doubled annually, with some skill developers making over $1 million a year