Amazon has decided to cut off paid perks for Alexa developers. The company confirmed to Engadget on Wednesday that it will end the Alexa Developer Rewards Program at the end of June. A second program that rewards developers for using Amazon Web Services as the backend for their Alexa apps will wrap up at the same time. With the emergence of generative AI, the pioneering voice assistant's third-party apps ("skills") no longer appear to be a central focus for the company. The news was first reported by Bloomberg and confirmed by Engadget with the company.

Did you miss a session from GamesBeat Summit Next 2022? All sessions are now available for viewing in our on-demand library. Click here to start watching. With Google Assistant inside and conversational AI, these speakers can do a great range of things. Here's 10 worth trying, drawn from VentureBeat coverage over the course of the past year. Before getting into the more dynamic features Google Assistant provides through Home smart speakers, start with the most popular ways people use speakers with intelligent assistants.

My background is in innovation and consulting. RAIN didn't start as a voice AI company -- at the time I joined RAIN, the company was doing many things in technology – voice AI being one of them – but it was not the sole focus. We pivoted to voice three years ago when I joined as CEO. There were so many early indications that voice technology would become ubiquitous. RAIN recognized early on that voice was bigger than those smart speakers we have in our homes.

Bespoken.io has developed a Test Robot that performs analog tests on voice-based hardware and software, mimicking human testing. The new robot extends Bespoken's voice testing beyond voice apps in a way that's necessary as voice technology companies and their ideas proliferate. Bespoken is best known for its virtual diagnostic tool, which is used by thousands of developers on most voice platforms to test, troubleshoot, and monitor voice apps for problems. The Test Robot goes beyond that function and into the realm of hardware by essentially recreating the way humans talk to voice apps, as can be seen in the test video at the top. The device can handle voice apps built on custom voice platforms as well as existing ones like those created by Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung.

Conversation is the key to the next wave of AI infrastructure investments. In 2014, Andrew Ng predicted that by 2020 more than half of all web searches would be non-text and instead they would instead be image and voice-based. While voice has yet to overtake the keyboard in terms of search traffic we are seeing a new inflection point in the voice market the rise of Conversational AI. Moving beyond simply voice commands and by combining the latest in voice recognition and language parsing technology with text-based smarts of interactive chatbots that has been developing rapidly over the last few years, Conversational AI promises to be a rich new vein of technology innovation. A range of new digital services are emerging as companies explore this new landscape of voice-first interactive applications that have the capacity to provide rich information as well as learning from interactions with users.

Voice is now a staple of our everyday consumer lives. This isn't surprising as voice is a natural, more efficient way to perform tasks. And just as we've watched voice evolve as a mainstay in the consumer world, we're now seeing how it transforms business. But the stakes are higher in an enterprise setting. If a consumer voice assistant tells you the weather for the wrong city, the impact on your day is negligible.

Researchers successfully sneaked malicious apps behind the defenses of two major smart speaker companies in a test on their security practices. Experts at Security Research Labs say the apps were design to target personal data like voice-recordings and passwords of both Google Home and Amazon Echo users by posing as software that reads horoscopes through voice-commands. The apps were only removed once researchers made the company aware of their test. All eight of the apps designed by the researchers were able to bypass Amazon and Google defenses and were approved by the companies' moderation teams - a lapse that experts say invites even greater scrutiny on smart devices' privacy and safety standards. 'As the functionality of smart speakers grows so too does the attack surface for hackers to exploit them,' write the researchers in their report.

Artificial intelligence and conversational computing platforms are no longer the sole domain of big businesses. Voice-computing technology can help a small or medium-sized business owner make interactions with customers more valuable. For one thing, voice computing technology can help improve customer service and efficiency by allowing customers to quickly and easily have a conversational experience with a business without the need for in-depth technical expertise. In the simplest terms, conversational computing is when you talk to a device and it talks back to you. Chris Messina, product designer and the inventor of the hashtag, has a bird eye's view of changes in the way we have conversations. We can use a variety of interfaces (voice, screen, messaging, etc.) and then carry the conversation to other interfaces without losing a beat or starting over.

In the United States, the average patient sees a physician just three times per year, according to the CDC, for visits lasting just 20 minutes each. Doctors, for their part, put more time into administrative tasks than face-to-face care: every hour spent with patients takes about two hours at the desk for documentation and other tasks, according to a Stanford study. More than half of all doctors report symptoms of burnout. In the United States, the average patient sees a physician just three times per year, for visits lasting just 20 minutes each. Voice-driven artificial intelligence (AI) can help cure the time shortage on both ends of the spectrum.

At Transform, an AI-focused event held by VentureBeat in Mill Valley, California, Google VP Scott Huffman, who is in charge of engineering teams for Google Assistant, shared some insights into what it takes to create lasting experiences with voice assistants. For example, becoming part of a person's daily routine helps drive adoption, and Google Assistant commands like "Create a reminder" or "Play music" are 40 times more likely to be action-oriented than a Google search query. Huffman did a great job of sharing unique insights from a platform perspective, but that's just one side of the story. On the other side are a host of developers, startups, and service providers making their own third-party experiences that work alongside Google Assistant or Alexa. Below is some tried-and-true advice for successful voice computing from three veterans in the industry. Perhaps more than any other portion of the tech industry, bots and artificial intelligence have made great strides in the past few years, while simultaneously suffering from overmarketed and even false claims.