In recent months, Amazon’s virtual assistant Alexa has already taken up residence in Ford and Toyota vehicles; skills are also available from manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, and General Motors. But it seems that that wasn’t enough for the online retailer. That’s why Amazon has released a SDK (software development kit) specially designed for developing skills in the automotive industry. The software is open source and available for free through GitHub . It was released by the Alexa Auto Team , founded last year.

Amazon is thus stepping up its competition with Apple’s CarPlay , the Google Assistant in Android Auto , the Houndify platform by SoundHound and Nvidia Drive . The corporation is evidently aiming for the growing infotainment-system market for vehicles and hopes to gain new ideas from the open-source community.