ERDF Funding Fuells ProfileTree’s Alexa Voice Project

ProfileTree is delighted to announce it is in receipt of ERDF or European Union region – European Regional Development Fund support for its Alexa Voice Project. This project focused on developing Alexa apps or “Skills”, which provide a new route to market for educational games or apps that ProfileTree has developed and generate revenue from the Amazon distribution platform.

Amazon or Alexa Skills lets customers use their voices to perform everyday tasks like checking the news, listening to music, and playing games. This support has been delivered through Invest NI and its team of business support experts, ensuring a successful project plan has been implemented and delivered.

ProfileTree Secured ERDF Support for Alexa Project

ProfileTree’s Alexa Voice project was partially financed by the Investment for Growth and Jobs Programme for Northern Ireland, which was co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.

ProfileTree received support from Invest NI for the Alexa Live Teaching App. This project, which is part-financed by the European Regional Development Fund under the Investment for Growth and Jobs Programme 2014-2020, aims to develop educational apps on the Amazon Alexa platform using the Alexa Skills AI.

ProfileTree has invested over two years of development time and content creation in this project—to upskill its internal team and develop out a revenue-generating stream through the latest voice technology. This support opened up new opportunities for ProfileTree to reach, educate, and entertain customers through Alexa-enabled devices in multiple countries around the world.

The fund supported investing in upskilling our team; it allowed time to be put into creating an R&D department in our company—one which has now migrated into its own stand-alone entity we call “Emerging Technology”.

The project started with identifying an internal team to upskill in the rapidly developing Alexa Skill software, which provides self-service APIs, Skill Components, and other tools. The team then invested time in learning Alexa’s best practices, design principles, and use cases to ensure they created the best possible apps in our target niche.

This investment also provided our team with an exciting challenge to focus on, as well as an opportunity to understand what is happening in Artificial Intelligence (AI)—an opportunity that is often not available to many small businesses.

Why Voice? Why Alexa?

Voice technology has emerged as a game-changer in the digital landscape, offering users a more intuitive and convenient way to interact with devices and services. From virtual assistants like Alexa to voice-activated search and commands, voice technology has transformed how we access information, perform tasks, and engage with digital platforms.

Voice is the most natural user interface for people today. It is sneaking into everyone’s daily lives—whether they realise it or not. With Amazon’s aggressive push into this new market with its voice technology and user adoption, it offers a unique opportunity to deliver our content to customers in any location, no matter what they are doing.

With Amazon Alexa Skills, we have been able to deliver voice experiences for a variety of skill types. One of the most interesting elements of this technology is that when you build a custom skill, you can define your own interaction model or interface rather than relying on one provided by Alexa. This custom interaction model specifies how customers’ spoken input maps to the requests that our skill can handle.

When a customer speaks to our skill, Alexa uses our interaction model to determine the customer intent and sends it to our skill application logic—in our case, knowledge skills. The customer is promoted by Alexa to answer a specific question. Based on their reply, our app confirms if they got the answer right or wrong.

Key Voice Technology Elements

Alexa voice is made up of “Intents“, which are the unique customer requests that our skill handles, as well as the more basic elements of Alexa skills such as stopping, cancelling, and asking for help. These intents can have optional “Slots“, which are variables in the process. These can help improve accuracy and are helpful for commonly used elements, such as dates or numbers.

“Utterances” are basically the verbal commands or verbal answers that customers will use throughout the skill and help Alexa understand how the skill should be used. A feature we enjoy is “Dialogue Management“, which is gathering information or a customer’s conversation with the app. The key here is to try and get a more natural feeling experience. Amazon also introduced its Skill Kits, or SDKs, which help remove some of the complexity of writing code for a skill basically through frameworks.

ERDF Funding Helps Deliver Alexa Skills

Focused on apps for kids (education, games, and knowledge), we created a range of skills in different topics—different skill levels with a variety of coding methods to discover what worked best; however, we also delivered the best revenue model. Some of the ranges that have been developed and published already include:

High Five Maths – Maths App for Kids

High Five Fitness – Fitness App for Kids

High Five Geography – Geography App for Kids

High Five English – English App for Kids

All these ranges build up and roll into the overall concept app—Alexa Live Teacher, a complete teaching app that supports parents and teachers with educating young children through the latest voice technology.

Throughout the development process, we aimed to create some of the best apps for kids with a mix of entertainment, gamification, and educational knowledge. This process will continue as we take customer feedback, update, and continue to improve the range of voice apps on offer.

Alexa Voice Project’s New Elements

Amazon has continued to release updates and improvements for this young technology, providing more opportunities moving forward. Alexa voice is an opportunity to work with an exciting, evolving, and accessible AI.

A very new element of Alexa is that it is trying to predict where it can help in people’s lives. This is driven by over 30 machine learning applications within the Alexa system, which is widely regarded as one of the most complex AI systems in the world. These interactions prompt or inform customers’ lives, which is a new step for our team to work on as we continue to enhance our own voice apps.

Another major change has been the push to voice-enabled devices with screens, such as the Alexa Show. We expect the system to continue to develop more like a mobile phone app and become a widget on an Alexa device.

“Cards” is another new feature which gives us the authority to promote the app on these screen devices on rotation. The most exciting recent improvement is the app discovery, where Amazon is trying to suggest more personalised skills based on customers’ use of similar skills and based on a key discovery system.

Moving forward, Alexa’s core concept is to be around customers in every room at home or outside of the house—from cars and phones. Alexa gets over 1 billion requests a week. With more than 130,000 skills available on the Alexa store, over 30% of interactions from Alexa were automated or AI-led.

In 2022, Alexa was available in 70 countries and 17 languages. There were hundreds of millions Alexa-enabled devices.

As of February 2024, Alexa is available in over 100 countries and territories and supports over 70 languages and dialects. At the end of 2023, Amazon surpassed half a billion Alexa-enabled devices globally.

This above data has been obtained from Amazon Alexa website.

We see customer expectations are rising based on the feedback we are gaining from the published apps. The bar is rising for these voice apps, and Amazon is supporting this drive with an increased cycle of new feature releases focused on app discovery, engagement, and monetisation. Amazon is keen to see its voice apps become part of the daily lives of its customers.

Looking Towards the Future

As we continue to develop out the systems we have developed for the new school term, it will be interesting to see how the discovery model evolves—an exciting time to be involved in the early years of the development of a platform that will clearly be a key AI in the years ahead.

ProfileTree’s Alexa Voice Project, fuelled by ERDF funding, exemplifies the transformative power of innovation in the digital age. By embracing emerging technologies and driving digital transformation, ProfileTree paves the way for a more accessible, intuitive, and inclusive digital future. As businesses across industries continue to embrace innovation, the possibilities for growth and advancement are limitless.