PredictHQ events now available in Amazon Alexa

Published on September 23, 2020

It’s not every day you get to share that one of the world’s top five companies with some of the most rigorous data quality standards is now a customer, but the PredictHQ team is delighted to share about our collaboration with Amazon Alexa.

This week Amazon Alexa released an update that enables the Alexa device to answer questions by its users about events going on around them. PredictHQ’s API of verified, geocoded and regularly updated event data is a key data source for this service.

The new Alexa feature, called “Events Near Me,” will provide Alexa users a list of all local events, such as sports, concerts and community events. Alexa devices in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, India, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain can now use this feature.

For example, some of our New Zealand team asked Alexa about events earlier this week and were thrilled to see our data was powering its responses:

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Even with COVID-19’s impact on attended events, there are millions of events still happening per month. For example, in October there are more than 24,000 events in the categories listed above in the United States. PredictHQ predicts the attendance of every event and ranks it by impact. PredictHQ is supplying Amazon Alexa with data from seven of our 18 categories: sports, concerts, conferences, expos, performing arts, community events, and festivals across all countries.

Amazon has exacting standards so we are honored that they’ve chosen our intelligent events data to provide a backbone of sorts for the new Alexa skill. While our verified event data is usually used directly in demand forecasting models by corporations and businesses, this is such a fascinating use case that has pushed the boundaries on how businesses can use our data. 

Data quality is our passion and we have written extensively about the need for forecast grade quality data. For more information on data quality: