Hearst Team Creating Amazon Skills For Alexa

Media company Hearst has put together a team of 10 people that is tasked with staying on top of cutting-edge technology, including voice-activated devices from the likes of Amazon and Google, and creating products and services around them.

According to a report by Adweek, Hearst launched a new unit, dubbed Native and Emerging Technologies, which is creating products around Amazon’s Echo and Google Home. Last week, the new group rolled out an Amazon Echo skill for its Good Housekeeping brand.

“We’re looking at this new wave of natural language interfaces as being a great source of content discovery and content interaction,” said Phil Wiser, Hearst’s chief technology officer, said in the report. “We find all of that to be increasingly important as a way to engage consumers.”

With the Good Housekeeping skill, Amazon Echo users can ask Alexa for help getting a stain out of something, and Alexa will reply with a step-by-step guide, as well as recommend tools to get the job done. The unit also made an Amazon skill for Elle magazine that provides horoscopes. It also developed skills for the San Francisco Chronicle and Houston Chronicle, two newspapers it owns. The skill reads the newspaper’s daily news via the Echo.

“It’s a really good branding opportunity — as we’re providing that advice, we can also give the consumer guidance on which brands they should look for,” Wiser added in the report. “That’s a theme that we’re going to build on as we take our expert editorial content and weave it in with branded content.”

Although the unit launched skills for a Hearst publication, the business is looking to bring advertisers on as customers, marrying skills with specific brands. For example, the stain remover skill could recommend a product that is approved by Good Housekeeping magazine. If it was a food skill, it could hawk a specific brand’s food ingredient when Alexa reads out a recipe.