Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa now have a brand new feature, built by Simon & Schuster, which should make it much easier to decide which of Stephen King’s titles a user should read. The new functionality is called Stephen King Library and is effectively an A.I.-powered app which asks a series of questions in order to pair the user with a book from a base of over 50 titles from the renowned author. For example, one series begins with a question about which of three groups a prospective reader would team up with during an apocalypse. Options provided are magicians, mentalists, and scientists. Each answer leads to further questions and the session, narrated by Jeremy Bobb, continues until a reading list can be created. By taking advantage of either platform’s user recognition features, that should mean that users can go through the books on that list one by one, moving on as each book is finished. Moreover, that should, at least in theory, help prevent repeat suggestions and users can also ask about prior reading lists to see what they’ve already gone through.
As is almost always the case with features on either company’s virtual assistant platform, accessing Stephen King Library varies slightly depending on which platform is used. Amazon Alexa users will need to enable the associated “Stephen King Library” Alexa Skill before getting started. Those with one of Google’s Home devices or any other platform on which Google Assistant is available can skip that step. Then users of either platform just need to trigger input via the appropriate voice command before saying “open Stephen King Library.” Other voice actions are also available for additional features. Several other voice actions are also listed on the official pages for either platform. Users will definitely want to experiment, beginning with “asking” Stephen King Library about “extras.”
The feature should already be available today, although there’s no word on where it is rolling out or how long the rollout might take. In the meantime, there may actually be a glaring issue with this new feature when it comes to those who are already fans of King’s works. Namely, there’s no way to tell the Stephen King Library which books a user has already read and there’s a good chance a lot of its suggestions are going to be among those. Setting that aside, as seen in the promotional videos below, everything should work as smoothly as might be expected and with consistency on both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.