Alexa recently added another new skill to her repertoire of well over 3,000, and it’s one that’s sure to make hungry Amazon Prime members happy.
Amazon has integrated Alexa’s functionality into Amazon Restaurants, the food delivery service side of Prime Now. Now, Prime members can voice-order their next meal through their Alexa-enabled devices. Prime members can ask Alexa to reorder past meals from Amazon Restaurants on their Echo or Echo Dot devices by issuing a voice command composed of a participating restaurant’s name or a cuisine type. Alexa will then pull up the user’s order history and list the meal options available for reorder.
Gus Lopez, general manager of Amazon Restaurants at Amazon, was quoted as saying: “Customers now have a hands-free, hassle-free way to reorder any meal from Amazon Restaurants using their voice to get dinner on the table. We are excited to leverage the innovative Alexa technology and give Prime members another easy way for Amazon Restaurants to take care of dinnertime with no menu markups and free delivery in one hour or less.”
The Prime Now restaurant delivery service, which first launched in Los Angeles in September 2015, enables customers in over 20 cities to view participating restaurants, browse menus, place orders and track the status of their delivery in real time. Amazon claims those deliveries come within an hour or less, with the average time clocking in at 39 minutes.
Along with introducing new Alexa skills, Amazon is boosting its partnerships to stave off increasing competition in 2017 from Lenovo, Google’s smart speaker and smart assistant; Google Home; and Apple’s HomeKit.
Amazon has announced partnerships with DISH Network, enabling Alexa to voice-control its Hopper DVR; Whirlpool, to connect Alexa to its smart appliances; and Samsung’s upcoming Roomba rival, POWERbot VR7000. Additionally, upcoming Westinghouse, Element and Seiki televisions will come built with Amazon Fire TV OS, thus being controllable by Amazon Echo.
