Cumulus Launches Custom Amazon Alexa Skills Network

RADIO ONLINE | Thursday, December 14, 2017

Cumulus Media has launched Amazon Alexa skills for 300 local radio stations, popular Westwood One brands, plus the leading dedicated Christmas Radio Skill, Christmas Radio. The move marks the largest collection of custom skills available with Amazon Alexa in the U.S.

This week has been the kick off of a national consumer marketing campaign designed to educate listeners on how to find and enable skills, fueled by local on-air, video and social promotion. Individual stations will create localized messaging that speaks directly to their unique listenership. The custom skills can be enabled vocally by using unique key phrases for each radio station; top Cumulus markets including New York City, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Dallas stations are now available.

"Voice-interactive technology is bringing radio listening back into the home and office, and will enable interactivity with our stations in the connected car," said Mike McVay, EVP, Programming and Content, Cumulus Media. "Our strategy to create a custom skill for individual radio stations and programs, while educating consumers, is critical as smart speakers have created an entirely new, and rapidly growing platform to consume audio content."

"At an aggregated network level we will have access to valuable data and insights on this rapidly-evolving audio ecosystem," said Suzanne Grimes, EVP, Corporate Marketing, Cumulus Media and President, Westwood One. "We are dedicated to educating, testing, and learning to evolve the listening experience for our listeners and brand partners."

Grimes says XAPPmedia was the clear choice to collaborate on this groundbreaking rollout, given the company's expertise in Voice and AI technologies, strong relationships with radio broadcasters, and the XAPPmedia One Voice AI™ SaaS platform that automates deployment and management of voice apps for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana. It took just a couple of weeks from the project kick off to launching hundreds of stations live on Alexa; across the board XAPP was efficient, organized, and adept.

"Cumulus Media has a track record as media innovators. It is a pleasure working with executives with a long-term vision for how voice interaction will change radio. Cumulus challenged us to move quickly because they wanted to have an immediate impact; no company has brought hundreds of media properties as individual and local custom skills to Amazon Alexa with this speed and at this scale," said Pat Higbie, CEO and co-founder of XAPPmedia. "Their Amazon Alexa skills network will yield tremendous insight into listener behavior. We are excited to be a part of this important milestone that's defining the direction for the voice interactive radio era."