Amazon's annual Alexa Live event was staged this week and saw new features revealed for developers and device makers alike. 

Alexa Live is Amazon's developer conference for "the future of ambient intelligence, smart home and voice AI." Basically a chance to show off what's coming down the line in the next year or so. 

Announcements made during the keynote from Amazon Devices and Services SVP Dave Limp were numerous, covering Alexa's role in smart homes, as well as updates and features relevant to hardware folks and Alexa Skill developers.

Amazon's smart home efforts focused on Alexa Ambient Home Dev Kit and updates to Matter – an IP-based IoT device communication standard used by companies including Amazon, Apple, and Google.

The Ambient Home Dev Kit is "a new collection of services and APIs that seeks to unify the ambient smart home experience for our customers," Amazon said in a roundup of Alexa news. 

At launch, the Ambient Home Dev Kit will include five APIs: 

Alexa Connect Kit is also getting an SDK for Matter that will bring ACK features to Matter-enabled devices. Amazon said cloud connectivity, over-the-air updates, logs, and metrics are included in the kit. 

For device makers, features center around Amazon's Voice Interoperability Initiative (VII), through which the online souk wants to allow multiple voice services to exist side by side on the same product. VII members include Qualcomm, Microsoft, and Facebook. Google and Apple – makers of the other two leading digital assistants – are absent.

Amazon mentioned just a couple of specific items in this category: 

Universal Device Commands are specifically mentioned as "future capabilities" that will be enabled sometime within the next year.

The bulk of the new features announced at Alexa Live 2022 concern developers working on Alexa Skills. The list is long, and what follows is a quick summary. Amazon has written extensively on many of the new features in blog posts published along with the event; for more information be sure to read Amazon's Alexa roundup linked above.

Alexa Live ran on Wednesday only, however registered attendees can view sessions on demand afterward. ®

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