Alexa’s slow but steady march across the glob continues, as Amazon gets ready to bring the smart assistant to Italy and Spain later this year. The AI will be joined by the company’s own Echo devices, along with with third-party hardware from Bose and Sonos.
In the meantime, the Amazon’s opening the Alexa Skills Kit to developers in those countries. It’s also making the Alexa Voice Service developer preview available to hardware developers looking to build third-party devices using the assistant and throwing in an Echo device to the first 100 devs for good measure.
Just this month, the company added nearby France to the list of Alexa/Echo markets, joining the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, India, New Zealand, Germany, Japan and Ireland. That manner of roll out takes time. In addition to priming the pump for developers, Alexa needs to be tweaked to learn not only a new language, but also accents, subtle linguistic nuances and local customs.
No word yet on the specific timeframe for launch, or which devices are coming to the aforementioned countries. France, for its part, got the Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Spot. Google meanwhile, has already added Italian support for Assistant and announced Home availability for Spain at I/O, along with Denmark, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.