AirKast Offers Alexa Skills To Its Clients

Alexa Skills

AIRKAST INC. has developed and will provide free ALEXA skills for all its customers, including over 800 North American radio stations, syndicated radio hosts and podcasters. Beyond launching radio music streams, AIRKAST’s ALEXA skills, "enables listeners to explore, interact and request other content from stations and hosts available through their own branded mobile apps, allowing those stations and hosts to collect and permission-based user data to help them sell mobile ad campaigns and drive listener engagement."

“We expect that these new ALEXA skills will be quite beneficial to radio stations -- by permitting them to forge easy-to-use personal connections with their audiences, and by giving them new content whenever and wherever they want it," AIRKAST CEO LARRY LEUNG said. "It’s our mission to not only provide basic ALEXA skills, but also more advanced voice recognition, so fans can interact with a radio station’s podcasts, show schedules and other application-based content,” he added. "The radio industry is excited to see the resurgence of ‘at home’ audio usage as it's been competing with other digital music services. The effort to deploy ALEXA skills is so minimal, it makes perfect sense to offer it free of charge."

AIRKAST is releasing other new features, including advance push notifications; multi-language support; intelligent message scheduling; segmentation opt-in/opt-outs; visual mobile listening heat maps that can help identify user activity down to the local county level; breaking news and weather alerts; and live in-app video streaming support.

“We’ve also added live in-app video support to recapture the attention of our customer’s branded audiences," AIRKAST VP/Engineering HUNG NGUYEN said. "Currently, many radio stations drive their audiences to third-party video sites, like FACEBOOK, YOUTUBE and PERISCOPE, and we want our customers to be able to bring their audiences back to their own broadcast and branded environment -- so they can start to measure and monetize their live video efforts. AIRKAST is committed to providing data that can help our customers make better business decisions and, most crucially, that can directly help drive radio sales and programming results.”

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