Amazon instituted “significant cost reductions” in the Echo Dot speaker design as it looked to bring voice command functionality to mainstream consumers, said a Tuesday ABI Research teardown report. ABI said the second-generation Dot is a lower-cost gateway than the “economically-priced” first-generation model, moving from a Texas Instruments chipset to one supplied by MediaTek. The first-gen Dot, $89.99, had a bill of materials (BOM) of $45.39, said analyst Jim Mielke, compared with the $49.99 second-gen Dot with a $34.87 BOM. But Smart speaker maker Fabriq, with an Alexa-equipped product retailing for the same price as the Dot, could be “the dark horse to watch,” said Mielke. The Fabriq speaker, based on a MediaTek chipset, works in battery mode as a Bluetooth speaker for remote music streaming, using a cellular device to connect to the internet. As a comparable Echo alternative, “Fabriq may just give Amazon a run for its money,” said Mielke. Google Home, with a $129 price point, has an estimated BOM of $43.44, said ABI. Google Home offers higher-end audio, Mielke said, saying it’s not clear whether Google will enter the sub-$50 voice command market.

Grange is the latest insurance company to offer Alexa integration, the company announced Monday. Echo owners can ask Alexa to help them find a local Grange insurance agent, hear an insurance tip each day and learn general information about the insurer’s product offerings. Alexa skills are also available for the Liberty Mutual and Safeco brands.

It won’t happen in time for CES 2017, but Wynn Las Vegas is equipping its 4,748 hotel rooms with Amazon’s Alexa-enabled Echo speaker. Alexa is due to be operational in all rooms by summer, with installation in suites beginning this month, said the hotel. Technology has been an important part of the resort experience for Wynn Resorts, said CEO Steve Wynn in a news release, and Alexa voice control will take it to a next level. “The ability to talk to your room is effortlessly convenient,” said Wynn, whose hotel will be the first resort to enable guests to verbally control lighting, temperature and TVs. When fully operational this summer, Alexa will initially control guest room lights, room temperature, drapes and TVs, said Wynn, and will add features such as personal assistant functions in the future.

SoundHound licensed Houndify voice control software to Rand McNally for its OverDryve dashboard infotainment tablet, said the companies in a Friday announcement. OverDryve gives drivers a hands-free way to access news, weather, traffic and sports, streaming music, navigation, calling and texting, they said. Yusuf Ozturk, chief technology officer at Rand McNally, said Houndify enables voice input within the company’s on-board navigation app to help minimize driver distraction.

Voice control has a bright future, said an ABI Research report Thursday, citing marketing efforts, digital assistant adoption on smartphones and “genuine consumer value” as contributors. Voice-controlled smart home devices such as Amazon’s Echo will be 30 percent of smart home device spending by 2021, despite barely existing as a category two years ago, said ABI. “Voice control will not only draw in new consumers to smart home functionality, but it will help transform a wide variety of new and emerging smart home services and devices into more attractive investments,” said ABI analyst Jonathan Collins. Voice will become a key smart home interface in smart home managed systems, with Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Samsung all having the capability to bring devices and functionality to market, he said. Voice control will assume a greater share of device revenue spending, but applications will drive its growth in the smart home and device categories, said the research firm. By 2021, more than 600 million smart home devices will ship annually, up from 40 million last year, it said. “The ability to integrate and extend voice control throughout the home environment will require many more smart home devices to work seamlessly with voice control offerings,” said Collins, appealing to home device and appliance vendors, installers and managed smart home systems providers to integrate with voice control platforms.

SoundHound and Boombotix introduced an Amazon Echo competitor on Kickstarter Monday, the Hurricane smart speaker, based on SoundHound voice control and a Boombotix speaker. The Hurricane is powered by the Houndify voice recognition and conversational intelligence platform, said a news release. Users can ask the Boombotix speaker “compound and complex” questions and “seamlessly" follow up, said the companies. Sample commands: “OK, Hound, play something chill” or “Let’s hear something new,” the release said. Users also can request a specific artist, song or album. Houndify provides what SoundHound called fast automatic speech recognition, advanced natural language understanding and accurate Speech-to-Meaning technology. Software development kits are available across major operating systems and platforms, SoundHound said. More than 15,000 companies have registered to use SoundHound for their products including Nvidia for an in-car application and Samsung for its smart home products, said SoundHound. Besides music, the Hurricane can provide information including weather, sports, news, stocks, nutritional values, flight status, local restaurant and business search from Yelp, Uber ride fares and time estimates, said the companies. Examples of interactive and conversational interactions: calculating a home mortgage, playing blackjack, or checking on a flight status, said the company. Content partners include Google and ESPN Radio, said the Kickstarter page. The Hurricane, starting at $129, had netted 41 backers and $7,014 out of a goal of 500 backers and $250,000 Monday afternoon, with delivery slated for January.

Samsung agreed to buy artificial intelligence platform company Viv Labs, founded by Siri co-creator Dag Kittlaus, it said in a Thursday announcement. The open AI platform will enable third-party developers to build “conversational assistants” and integrate a natural language-based interface into apps and services, Samsung said. The deal is part of Samsung’s vision to deliver an AI-based open ecosystem across all of its devices and services, it said, in what is becoming a crowded space inhabited by Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft. Viv simplifies user interfaces, understands context and offers appropriate and convenient suggestions and recommendations, Samsung said. “Unlike other existing AI-based services, Viv has a sophisticated natural language understanding, machine learning capabilities and strategic partnerships that will enrich a broader service ecosystem,” said Injong Rhee, chief technology officer of Samsung’s mobile communications business. Viv’s focus on consumers and developers attracted Samsung as a platform that can integrate its home appliances, wearables and other products “as the paradigm of how we interact with technology shifts to intelligent interfaces and voice control,” Rhee said. Kittlaus said in a presentation at Tech Crunch Disrupt in May that virtually every major technology company is investing “billions of dollars” in the intelligent assistant space. He said essential aspects to take intelligent assistants to the next level are having one assistant vs. myriad apps, an assistant that’s personalized to the individual and the ability to transfer the experience to multiple devices. Viv’s third-party ecosystem can do “tens of thousands of things,” he said.

Amazon opened registration Thursday for the Alexa Prize, a university competition designed to advance conversational artificial intelligence (AI), it said in a news release. The team with the highest performing “socialbot” will win $500,000, and an additional $1 million will be awarded to the winning team’s university if the students' socialbot can converse “coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes,” said Amazon. A socialbot that can converse coherently for 20 minutes "is unprecedented and at least five times more advanced than state-of-the-art conversational AI,” said Rohit Prasad, head scientist, Amazon Alexa. The competition challenges students to build socialbots that can acquire knowledge and opinions from the web, and "express them in context just as a human would in everyday conversations," said Prasad. The challenge is designed to advance areas of conversational AI including knowledge acquisition, natural language understanding, natural language generation, context modeling, commonsense reasoning and dialog planning, said Amazon. Students will build their socialbots using the Alexa Skills Kit and will have access to conversational topic categories and digital content from multiple sources. The Washington Post agreed to make its complete news feed and comments available to students for noncommercial use, Amazon said. Jeff Bezos is an owner of both companies. As part of the research and judging process, millions of Alexa customers will be able to converse with the socialbots on popular topics by saying, "Alexa, let's chat about (a topic, for example, baseball playoffs, celebrity gossip, scientific breakthroughs, etc.)," Amazon said. After the conversation, Alexa users will give feedback on the experience to help improve the socialbots. The feedback from Alexa users also will be used to help select the socialbots that will advance to the live judging phase. University student teams can submit applications through Oct. 28 and the contest will wrap up at AWS re:invent in November 2017 where winners will be announced, it said. Up to 10 teams will be sponsored by Amazon and receive a $100,000 stipend, Alexa-enabled devices, free AWS (Amazon Web Services) and support from the Alexa team, it said.

SoundHound partnered with Uber and Yelp for its Houndify voice-enabling developer platform, the company said in a Wednesday announcement. Houndify, launched in December after a decade of R&D, allows developers to add voice-enabled conversational intelligence to products and apps, said SoundHound. With the new partnerships, Houndify developers “have the tools to create experiences that enable voice interfaces for finding the best restaurant and booking an Uber to get there,” said SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer. The Uber domain allows developers to access Uber data and initiate booking, said the company, so they can incorporate Uber ride requests into their product experiences, including asking fare and distance information hands-free, it said. They also can access Yelp data to create voice-enabled experiences for local search.