Alexa Introduces Voice Recognition SEO

It’s not just about mobile phones, laptops and PC’s anymore. If you want your business to leverage forward, you need to be ready for the next piece of technology that’s bound to take over. And smart devices might just be what you should be looking at.

Amazon Alexa entered the market in 2014 and it’s been well received by household consumers. Recently, Amazon made an announcement that might make this device even more significant. A new feature will be added to Alexa which will help improve the existing Alexa skill discovery.

Nameless Invocation

Known as Nameless invocation, this new feature will help businesses reach out to more people if they play their cards right. Many refer to it as the CanFulfillIntentRequest.

With CanFulfillIntentRequest, Alexa can query multiple skills on their ability to fulfill the request given the customer intent and slot values. For example, if a customer asks, “Alexa, where is the best surfing today near Santa Barbara?” Alexa can use CanFulfillIntentRequest to ask surfing skills whether they can understand and fulfill the request.

Your ultimate goal is to make your website and brand discoverable, and that is exactly what Alexa will do if you can tweak your SEO accordingly.

Whenever a user asks Alexa for something related to your skill or your field in general, the device will offer your business information as a recommendation. What makes this feature unique is that users do not even have to know your particular skill or your brand to get paired with your website.

The term, Nameless invocation marks the entry of voice search engine optimization (SEO) in the market for Alexa. Gone are the days of worrying about doing SEO just for Google. Optimizing for voice search is a skill that you must use to your advantage, especially when so few businesses are taking advantage of it.

What’s Happening Behind the Scenes?

When a user asks Alexa a question, it makes a decision on the spot as to where it will source information from. Earlier, it would go through its knowledge base or other data sources that catered to the subject of the particular question.

Now, the voice assistant will be able to consult the CanFulfillIntentRequest information too. If it feels that the user’s query can be resolved with the help of a particular skill, then Alexa will recommend it.

A surfing skill with a database of California beaches might be able to both understand and fulfill the request, while one with a database of Hawaiian beaches might only be able to understand it. Based on these responses, Alexa would invoke the skill with the database of California beaches for the customer. Note that Alexa will only send CanFulfillIntentRequest to skills that are likely to be able to handle the associated intent.

There are a few holes in the software that need to be fixed and refined, but overall it provides a great platform to showcase what Amazon and smart devices are capable of doing. Build a presence on Alexa, master a skill and become a part of the CanFulfillIntentRequest family.