Amazon’s latest feature for its Alexa voice assistant focuses on live music. Alexa can now answer questions about upcoming concerts and music venues, globally.
Announcing the news overnight, Amazon provided some examples of the kind of questions people will be able to ask using this new feature. “Alexa, when is Bruno Mars coming to LA?” will work, as will “Alexa, is Metallica touring?” and “Alexa, where is the next Kenny Chesney concert?” and “Alexa, what time does Pink’s concert start?” and “Alexa, is there a concert at AT&T Park today?”.
USA Today has been testing the new feature and comparing Alexa’s performance to that of Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri, finding the latter two wanting when it comes to answering these queries. One important point: there isn’t a follow-on action at this point: music fans can’t ask Alexa to buy them tickets to the concerts they’ve asked about. Clearly, though, there is scope for that kind of feature in the future – and we know that ticketing companies like Ticketmaster are interested in the potential for their platforms to integrate with voice assistants too. Amazon’s own ticketing ambitions have been reined in over the past year, but Alexa’s new feature will give the company some interesting data on people’s live-music queries, which could guide its future ticketing plans – whether in-house or via partnerships.
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