For the last two years, I've been talking about how Alexa will connect to third-party apps/Skills based on a user's question, and the idea of having to remember app/Skill names would fade away. A major step towards that future was just announced today. developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/po… Third-party Skills can now explicitly tell the Alexa service what they can understand and fulfill, so Alexa can match a user's request to a third-party skill without a specific name being invoked. They have some cute examples of how this can be used, like the one below.

With all due respect to the design studio involved, this entire article highlights so many issues with the current state of digital design. The first being the viewpoint that Amazon needs “fixing” and that designers know better and are the ones to do it.

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There isn’t an industry out there that isn’t afraid of Amazon, 100 million people are Prime subscribers, and they account for almost half of all ecommerce spend, but it needs “fixing” because the website isn’t pretty.