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A comment on What Amazon's Alexa economy pays the people building its skills.

Re:What Amazon's Alexa economy pays the people building its ... by gridit on Thursday December 28, 2017 @11:51AM (#16023167)
Wolfram Alpha debuted in 2009. Just imagine what they could have been if they'd opened up "skill" creation to the public.

Given that devices equivalent to Alexa or Google Home could pretty much be launched on Kickstarter, is the ecosystem large enough to allow an open-source or more public version of the AI assistant? Is it needed?

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Re:What Amazon's Alexa economy pays the people building its ... by cepth on Thursday December 28, 2017 @12:28PM (#16023390)
Wolfram Alpha actually has a pretty significant collection of “widgets” (http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/). These are commonly embedded on math and science related pages. The more clever widgets take full advantage of Wolfram Alpha’s NLP abilities.

As to why they didn’t have Alexa-style voice skills, I’m not sure speech recognition is a core competency of the company.

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