Amazon lets amateurs publish custom Alexa apps to reach broad audiences

Echo buttons (Amazon/TNS)

Amazon is enlisting customers to create voice-controlled games, broadcast lectures and sermons, and turn blogs into audio presentations available to anyone, through its growing universe of Alexa-enabled speaker-and-microphone devices. 

The move, rolled out this week, represents a potentially significant advancement for voice-first computing and content creation – akin to the arrival in the mid-1980s of desktop publishing and blogging a decade later – and one that sets Amazon apart from top competitor Google, said observers and users of the technology.