Travel giant Expedia, Inc.EXPE yesterday rolled out a new travel updates skill for Amazon’s AMZN Alexa service. The skill is compatible with all Alexa-enabled devices, Echo, Echo Dot and Fire TV.
The Skill in Detail
With the Expedia skill enabled, Alexa’s voice-activated system can give users real time travel updates and information.
It enables users to ask for specific information pertaining to flight status, hotel bookings, rental car reservations, loyalty points balance and so on. Simple commands and questions will do the trick.
The move underscores Expedia’s increasing interest and investment in natural language processing and voice recognition technologies. Technology companies are increasingly going after this rapidly evolving space to come closer to customers.
It has recently launched Expedia bot for Facebook FB Messenger to search and book hotels easily.
EXPEDIA INC Price
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Key Takeaways
A solid travel booking platform, a strong travel market, contribution from a series of acquisitions, the Ctrip deal and management execution are positives for Expedia.
On the flipside, foreign exchange headwinds increased investments in the business, increasing competition across geographies and lack of ADR growth in emerging markets are concerns for the company.
The recent move appears to be part of Expedia’s prudent growth plan for both domestic and international markets and will likely help it to counter the challenges. Shares of Expedia have been steadily treading higher in the past three months. The stock generated a return of 10.71% as against the Zacks Electronic Commerce Market loss of 1.78%.
We believe that the company remains well-positioned for the long term because of the range of choice that it offers.
As far as Amazon is concerned, it’s not clear yet where Echo is headed, but partnerships like these will make Alexa the central point of connecting IoT devices used in any household.
Recently, the company made its Alexa voice service available for CNBC skill that provides users top business news and market information.
Zacks Rank
Both Amazon and Expedia carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). A better-ranked stock is NVIDIA Corporation NVDA , sporting a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here .
For the current year, the consensus estimate for NVIDIA has increased 33.3% in the past 30 days.
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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
