Amazon has showcased two glitzy Alexa-powered escape rooms at MWC, Barcelona, to provide its consumers with a sneak peek of what its soon-to-be-launched action series, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, is going to be like. Amazon wanted this interactive experience to help Alexa reach out to the “difficult-to-reach influential geek audience.”
During the company’s earnings a few weeks ago, Jeff Bezos revealed that a lot of the company’s latest increment in revenue was due to increased Alexa take-up. This new initiative is also booming the number of consumers signing up for Prime memberships, with a lot more new paid members joining the year before than in any previous year.
We’ve reached an important point where other companies and developers are accelerating adoption of Alexa. – Jeff Bezos
This increment has allowed Amazon to invest in action shows, with Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan to be launched on Prime Video later this year. The escape rooms at MWC combined the two most popular trends of the day, Alexa assistant and escape rooms, to make participants crack a code through a back-of-the-cereal box number, letters, and cipher. The room was well equipped with state-of-the-art Alexa-powered smart devices like Echo Spot, Echo Show, and the original Echo.
In a related initiative, Amazon had also created an escape room for Amazon Echo, which was revealed at Comic-Con New York. The Amazon Echo experience was the world’s first voice-activated escape room. Amazon described the experience in the following way, “Teams navigated through a series of five rooms, solving intricate puzzles along the way. They had to conquer a laser maze without tripping up and put mind over matter in an interrogation room. But each team had one very superior advantage: Alexa was a member of the team. The world we created was a perfect blend of physical challenges, technology, and of course, artificial intelligence, essentially gamifying the smart home.”
This escape room had received an overwhelming response from attendees, leading the way to a live interactive Twitch broadcast featuring three top personalities from the world of eSports: CaptainSparklez, Swiftor, and OMGitsfirefoxx.
