With Amazon's new "Alexa Custom Assistant" program, companies can effectively build their own branded voice assistants, complete with custom wake words, voices and skills only available to their customers. Custom assistants will make use of Alexa's natural language understanding and other technologies at the core of Amazon's AI assistant.
One of the first companies making use of the program is Fiat Chrysler, which already has an existing Alexa integration for some of its car models. However, Amazon is clearly aiming beyond the automotive space, with a blog post mentioning home workout gear, set-top boxes and robot vacuum cleaners.
Ultimately, these custom assistants are still based on Alexa, and Alexa will actually coexist on devices that use a custom assistant. The custom assistant program could convince companies to choose Alexa over Google's assistant or custom solutions built by third-party providers.