Alexa Skills Kit
Give Your Vision a Voice and Reach More Customers
Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices including the Echo family of devices, FireTV, Fire Tablet, and third-party devices with Alexa built-in. You can build capabilities, or skills, that make Alexa smarter and make everyday tasks faster, easier, and more delightful for customers. Tens of thousands of developers have built skills using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples. With ASK, anyone can leverage Amazon’s knowledge in voice design to build quickly and easily. Start building today to reimagine your customer experience for voice and reach customers where they are.
Create natural, engaging voice experiences and reach and delight customers through Alexa-enabled devices. Use our SDKs, APIs, and code samples to build games, kid-friendly skills, content skills, music skills, and more. Deliver habit-forming skills that entertain, inform, and deliver value to the whole family and keep them coming back.
Design, build, and deploy visually rich experiences to tens of millions of Alexa devices with screens. Use the Alexa Presentation Language to create voice-first, visual Alexa skills that adapt to different device types, including Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, Fire Tablet, and more. Build games that connect to Echo Buttons and turn an Echo device into a hub of interactive play.
When you build delightful skills with compelling content, customers win. Now you can make money with your Alexa skill. Sell premium content to enrich your Alexa skill experience with in-skill purchasing, or offer a new sales channel by selling physical goods and services with Amazon Pay for Alexa skills. You can also get paid for engaging skills that customers love most via Alexa Developer Rewards.
Alexa converts spoken words to text using automatic speech recognition (ASR), deduces the speaker’s meaning using natural language understanding (NLU), and provides the underlying customer intent to your skill.
You can take advantage of native voice user interfaces for smart home, music, video, and flash briefing skills, or define your own custom voice user interface.
Learn more: Custom interaction models
You can create skills in multiple languages. A skill can support a single language or any combination of the available languages.
Learn more: Available languages
You can use text-to-speech (TTS) and audio streams to respond to customer queries. You can add visual elements and touch inputs on Alexa-compatible devices with displays, and can add support for Echo Buttons.
Learn more: Multimodal experiences
You can make money through Alexa skills using in-skill purchasing (ISP) or Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills. You define your product offering and price, and Amazon handles the voice purchasing flow.
Learn more: Make money with Alexa
You can write your back-end web service using any programming language and host it in either AWS Lambda of the HTTPS server of your choice. You can use ASK SDKs to get started quickly and take advantage of AWS promotional credits for Alexa.
Learn more: ASK SDKs and AWS credits
"I wanted to explore more business models and really see what’s possible on Alexa,” says Gal Shenar, maker of more than 30 Alexa skills, some of which offer premium experiences. Shenar says he’s seeing an upsell conversion rate of 34% on his popular skill Escape the Airplane—“much higher than what you’d expect on mobile."
The new Alexa Presentation Language (APL) makes it easy to design, build, and deploy visually rich experiences to tens of millions of Alexa devices with screens.
Coming soon, you can use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Music Skill API to stream from your music service to Alexa customers in the US.
A consumable is an in-skill product that customers can purchase, use, and then purchase again. Developers can build skills with consumables using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Command-Line Interface (CLI). Learn more