[wsr]

According to Alexa Voice Service page (https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-vo...)

Amazon is starting a $100M fund for anyone building voice related services. This is very interesting. Has any company been funded via this fund?

[cek]

The Alexa Fund page lists a sub-set of the companies that have received funding from the fund so far: https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/alexa...

[scholia]

So how does Amazon make money from Alexa running on non-Amazon devices? (Not obvious to me, sorry.)

[bpicolo]

It's going to evolve into a massive app ecosystem, surely with paid apps

[soylentcola]

It looks like you can use it for non-commercial purposes but I imagine that they'd make money a few ways: indirectly through publicity and familiarity (the more people are used to having it, the more might use Amazon's commercial version or just Amazon stuff in general), directly (through licensing it for commercial use), and via improvements they make to their service as a result of people using the free version for non-commercial applications (better voice training and interpretation).

That's just a guess but it's similar to what Google does with AOSP and Google Android.