Amazon Alexa is now the voice agent for marketing analytics platform Datorama

Amazon devices that offer the Alexa intelligent voice agent

If you thought intelligent voice agents were only for handlessly searching the web or calling up your favorite songs, it’s time to recalibrate.

This week, marketing analytics firm Datorama announced that its Marketing Integration Engine has been integrated with devices powered by Amazon’s Alexa voice agent, including Echo and Echo Dot. Subscribers to the Datorama platform need to ask Alexa to enable the “Ask Datorama Anything” skill.

CMO Leah Pope told me via email that, as far as her company knows, this is the only Alexa front end for a marketing tool. She added that Sisense also has an Alexa front end, but “they are classified as a traditional BI [business intelligence] tool, not marketing analytics.”

Pope said a typical use case is during a meeting, when it’s easier just to ask for data than to search on a laptop to find it. The Integration Engine is designed to integrate a variety of data sources into a unified report, and customers include L’Oréal, Foursquare, Yahoo! JAPAN and GoDaddy.

The New York City-based company suggested a couple of typical dialogues:

You: “Alexa, ask Datorama: What is my top performing campaign by clicks in the last week?”

Alexa: “Your top performing campaign is ‘Holiday Free Shipping’ with 8,000 clicks.”

Or:

You: “Alexa, ask Datorama: Can you send me a breakdown of my top performing campaigns by ROI this quarter?”

Alexa: “The visualization you asked for has been sent to your mailbox. It should be available shortly.”

Pope noted that natural language processing is handled by Alexa, while Datorama understands certain tokens, such as the words “goals,” “campaign,” “channel,” “Facebook,” “top performing,” “underperforming” and “send notification.” If a client has specific naming conventions for, say, a KPI, she said that Datorama’s services team can implement that customization on the back end.

A command can also include drill-downs that Datorama has implemented, so that a request to find the status of campaign goals could include KPIs, their values, their targets, days remaining and the ability to “elaborate more” to get additional detail on a given goal.