For Amazon, better skills mean bigger ad revenue

Amazon is improving its Alexa voice assistant with each new update, enabling more natural conversation patterns and upgrading the system's ability to understand complex or vague questions. All of this is great for people who are sick of screaming, "ALEXA," and repeating commands a dozen different ways before the device actually does what it's supposed to. However, these upgrades are also good for advertisers -- and, by association, Amazon. Amazon hasn't laid out a clear, public plan for Alexa-enabled ads, but the company showed off the future of voice-assisted product placement during its event on Thursday. Head of all things Alexa, David Limp, explained that Amazon's voice assistant sometimes doesn't have the answer itself, but one of its skills (connected apps) might.