Parkopedia Debuts Voice-Enabled Parking Assistance Through Amazon Alexa

Connected vehicle services provider Parkopedia has debuted a new Amazon Alexa skill designed to help travelers access voice-enabled parking assistance, according to a press release emailed to PYMNTS Wednesday (June 8).

This comes as a potentially record-breaking 50 million people will be traveling by car between July 1 and July 5 this year, according to statistics from the American Automobile Association. Last year, 43.6 million people traveled by car during that period.

The new service from Parkopedia will let drivers find and pay for parking, either from home or on the go. It will use the Amazon cloud-based voice service to access the Parkopedia database, which will provide users with the nearest parking spot to a selected address.

The release also cited statistics from Juniper Research, which indicate that the use of voice-interactive devices is expected to balloon to 8.4 billion devices by 2024, overtaking the world’s population.

Eugene Tsyrklevich, founder and CEO of Parkopedia, said the tech was developed because customers have heightened expectations of how technology should seamlessly work between various environments, including work, home and the car.

“When behind the wheel, one voice command can replace several manual actions, vastly improving safety and efficiency,” he said. “The latest generation of voice assistants now also utilize AI to learn and think — understanding a variety of accents and gaining the ability to action more than one command at a time, as well as analyzing user data to learn individual preferences.”

Last year, PYMNTS wrote that Parkopedia teamed with CarPay-Diem on a new multi-domain payment platform to allow in-car payments.

See also: Parkopedia Partners With CarPay-Diem To Expand In-Car Payment Services

The partnership was expected to allow Parkopedia to add more “pay at the pump” services in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.