With finals coming to an end and graduations happening for some, being a college student these past few weeks was no easy task. Nevertheless, students around the world brought their innovations to life by participating in our Hack-Your-World with Amazon Alexa contest. Check out the winners. 

Today we’re excited to share that this feature now includes usage information about your smart home skills and flash briefings.

Alexa and ecobee are at the forefront of voice user interface (VUI) design. We spoke with Tarun Tuli, director of embedded systems at ecobee, to learn how he and his team are approaching product development with voice control as the primary user interface.

We're excited to announce that Microsemi has released a 2-mic hands-free audio front end solution as part of the expanding Development Kits for AVS offering. The Microsemi AcuEdge™ dev kit enables you to design high-quality voice recognition interfaces while reducing engineering time and cost.

We are very happy to announce tunable lighting control, a feature in the Smart Home Skill API, is now available in the UK.

Simplicity is at the core of all Hive devices, which made integration with Alexa a natural next step, says Elvin Nagamootoo, Hive product lead. Using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), the Hive team built a smart home skill and a custom skill.

This is part five of our Makers Academy series for Ruby developers. Learn more about this free training on the Alexa Skills Kit and read part one, part two, part three, and part four.

We are excited to announce a new addition to the Smart Home Skill API, the ability to define appliance categories. By defining appliance categories, both you and your customers can easily identify the types of smart home devices with which they are interacting.

With the increased popularity of Alexa-compatible smart home devices, we’ve seen a surge in the number of smart home skill submissions. In this post, we’ll highlight key requirements, common issues we’re seeing, and helpful reference material for skills implemented using the Smart Home Skill API.

If you’re a Dish Network subscriber, or you’re thinking about becoming one, finding the perfect show or movie just got a lot easier with Alexa voice control. Dish Network subscribers can now voice control their TV experience with the Hopper DVR set-top box and the Echo Family of Devices.

Customers expect a delightful experience on Alexa, and it is our top priority to maintain that experience. With that in mind, today we are clarifying our policy on advertising in Alexa skills.

We invite you to join the students on their Alexa Prize journey and help them along the way. You can interact with their socialbots simply by saying “Alexa, let’s chat” on any device with Alexa.

In 2016, we launched the Alexa Champions, a recognition program that honors the most engaged developers and contributors in our community. Today we’re excited to recognize seven new Alexa Champions who’ve enriched the Alexa community.

Many Alexa skill developers use AWS Lambda and Node.js for your Alexa skill’s web service. If your skill still uses Node.js v0.10 functions, you need to migrate to one of the newer Node.js versions (4.3 or 6.10) by May 30, 2017.

Soon you will be able to enable notifications for select skills and Amazon.com shopping updates on most devices with Alexa. Companies like AccuWeather, The Washington Post, and Just Eat will be among the first to update their skills with notifications. AVS and ASK dev tools are also coming soon.