The combination of voice and visual interaction with voice-assistance is both rich and exciting. We still need to see some improvements on the voice front. But what’s wrong with today’s visual experience? Early signs show that Amazon just might be on the right track.

Short history of APL

Here’s a short timeline:

• 1995 - HTML 2.0 is published
• 1996 - CSS 1.0 is published
• Two decades of HUGE evolution in frontend. Including countless amazing technologies such as Flash and Canvas and many more
• 2017 - Amazon introduces it’s first Alexa with screen
• 2018 - Amazon introduces APL
• 2019 - First sign of Amazon stepping sideways to HTML?

Since the first Echo Show has been released, people have been asking for HTML on APL (for example see, this one and that one). When Amazon first announced APL, it was very surprising as it looked like a re-make of the entire frontend as we know it. That seems like a lot of effort, given the much easier alternative of adopting the decades-long maturity of the HTML and CSS ecosystem.

Indeed Amazon has built an entirely new display coding language based on JSON.

A step sideways to HTML?

If you will look at new requests invoked by Alexa, you might find the following new supported interface:

{
    "supportedInterfaces": {
        "Alexa.Presentation.HTML": {},
        ...
    }
}

Searching the web, we were not able to find any official references or mentions of this new presentation interface yet. However, if the name of the interface does indicate Amazon are planning to support HTML interface, then these are indeed amazing news as developers will be able to build their visuals on a much more advanced framework.