By will-buy
Amazon is offering smart home device manufacturers more flexibility and control over their Alexa-enabled products. The new Alexa Connect Kit SDK (ACK SDK) augments the ACK introduced in 2023 to better fit the manufacturer’s design and fabrication preferences, lowering costs and opening the doorway for a more extensive Alexa-enabled smart home ecosystem.
ACK Inside
The ACK is designed in an effort to simplify adding Alexa to the device. The kit allows Alexa to manage the unit with no builder needing to design any firmware or setup an Alexa skill. Last year, Amazon released the ACK Module with Espressif Chipset, adding Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and halving its prices to further encourage device manufacturers to embed Alexa within their Internet of Things products.
The ACK SDK extends that effort by giving manufacturers having a method to make more granular adjustments. The ACK allows builders more leeway in selecting the size, material, along with other aspects of the device, in some cases decreasing the cost of manufacturing more than was feasible for Alexa-enabled devices before. Developers can come up with prototypes with ACK SDK, including the callbacks and APIs supplied by Alexa they want to insert. The ACK SDK works together with Espressif, but developers can submit other System-on-Chips (SoC) for Amazon’s approval if they have a preference. When the prototype design is refined, the organization can start making and selling Alexa-enabled appliances and smart home devices.
“ACK SDK comes pre-integrated with components for Alexa control (Smart Home Skill APIs), Frustration Free Setup, security, log and metric collection, and firmware updates – managed by Amazon,” Amazon senior tech product manager Nithya Chandrasekaran explained inside a blog post. “Further, since ACK SDK can be obtained as source code, it enables you to definitely customize much more, for example fine-tuning power profiles if you take benefit of the SoCs low-power modes and having better treatments for peripherals.”
