How to Make Your Website Amazon Alexa’s Top Choice

At the Marketing AI Institute, we read dozens of articles on artificial intelligence every week to uncover the most valuable ones for our subscribers and we curate them for you here. We call it 3 Links in 3 Minutes. Enjoy!

Does Amazon Alexa Pull Answers from Your Website? Here’s How to Ensure She Does.

When you ask a home assistant such as Amazon Alexa, Google Home or Microsoft Cortana for the weather, you get one answer, not a page of results to choose from. This simplicity is part of what makes these home devices so popular. But, what does this mean if your website is not the source Alexa uses to answer?

Juniper Research predicts by 2023, there will be 275 million voice assistants in use. With more and more users asking these devices questions, the need for businesses to get found using search is escalating as well. To help, Inc. shared a few top ways to optimize your business for voice.

Keywords are no longer the key. For voice search, emphasis is on language and short explicit answers that match search queries. Here’s how to make sure your website’s content is voice searchable:

• Length: Pages built to answer questions need to be as complete as possible.

• Structure: Sites with organized, readable, and logically presented content will rank higher.

• Clarity: Subheadings, bullets and other navigation aids make the content more digestible.

• Quality: Keep your content original, honest, and thorough.

Here’s How to Make a Business AI-Ready

According to Forbes, only five percent of companies (of the 38 surveyed) currently describe their existing AI capabilities as industry-leading. Yet, it is agreed across the board that artificial intelligence is revolutionizing how businesses operate. Is your business AI-ready? If not, here are a few next steps to prepare it.

First, businesses must appoint an executive-level AI champion that not only understands the capabilities of artificial intelligence, but also how they feed into the needs of the business.

AI-focused training and continued learning for employees is also essential to propelling your company. Workers need more familiarity with the technology, even those who do not directly interact with it.

Organizations without departments devoted to the advancement of AI must rely on support from consultants and partners to integrate the technology and achieve their business goals. Forbes touts that 54 percent of respondents are already doing this.

Above all, it is imperative that organizations understand and embrace the impact artificial intelligence will have on their business. Read the full list of next steps here.

Adobe Offers a Lesson in AI and UX

For a Adobe, a company that relies on visual content, integrating AI and machine learning into their products was a no-brainer. However, making sure their user experience (UX) remained top-notch was a challenge.

VentureBeat interviewed Adobe Document Cloud’s director of engineering and data, David Parmenter, for more insight into the product offerings. He shared how image recognition and the program’s ability to recognize movement and gestures have tremendously improved the quality and efficiency of users’ creations.

Nonetheless, integrating these new capabilities has to be seamless. Parmenter shared, “There’s a lot of UX design there. You have to give the user a gesture that makes sense to them, that they can then execute on, and it has to work the first time or they’ll never use the feature again.”

For example, Adobe Sensei, the platform’s AI-powered “assistant,” can sort through million of photos in a user’s library and serve up the highest-quality ones without them lifting a finger. Training for this skill took tremendous effort to ensure it worked flawlessly once released. Otherwise, users would find it useless and dismiss the tool from the start.