We are delighted to announce that customers in the UK, Germany, and Austria can pre-order the Echo Show. 

Echo Show brings you everything you love about Alexa, and now she can show you things. Echo Show’s high-quality screen combines with Alexa skills to deliver a completely new way for customers to interact across voice and graphical user interfaces.

With Echo Show, customers can watch video flash briefings, see music lyrics, smart home cameras, photos, weather forecasts, to-do and shopping lists, and more. Using the developer tools in the Alexa Skills Kit, developers can optimize Alexa skills for the screen and connect smart home cameras to Alexa.

Optimise Your Alexa Skills for Echo Show

All Alexa skills will automatically be available on Echo Show. Skills will display any skill cards you currently return in your response objects. This is very similar to how customers see your Alexa skill cards on the Alexa app, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet devices today. If no skill card is available, a default template shows the skill icon and skill name.

While your skills will work out of the box, we know that you may want to create visual experiences unique to Echo Show. Use our new visual templates to provide imagery, formatted text, and video as part of your skill responses. Visit our Voice Design Guide and our best practices for skill card design guide to learn how skills can accommodate audio, visual, and touch interfaces.

Build Optimised Display and Video Interfaces

You can choose from several display templates for your skill. You can also stream videos on Echo Show using video player interfaces in the Alexa Skills Kit. Simply provide access to your video content and the video interface will render video on the device, allowing customers to control the playback using both voice and touch.

Enable Customers to View Smart Home Cameras

You can also enable your customers to view live video feeds from their smart home cameras on Echo Show with the Smart Home Skill API. With Echo Show, customers can say, “Alexa, show the baby’s room” and have the feed from an internet-connected camera like Arlo and Ring display on Echo Show.

Get Inspired

Many developers are already using the screen to provide delightful customer experiences. With Echo Show Alexa flash briefings now include video content from favourite news providers like BBC News, The Telegraph, Tagesschau, ZDFheute Xpress, heise online, ntv Wirtschaft und Nachrichten, Deutsche Welle

Developers of popular recipe skills including Recipedia, Daily Mail Recipes , Chefkoch & Kitchen Stories have all enhanced their skill for Echo Show.

The team at Kitchen Stories developed a skill for Alexa when the Amazon Echo arrived in Germany last year. Now, with the announcement of Echo Show, the team has updated the skill to leverage the screen.  You can read more about Kitchen Stories on Echo Show here.

"I remember the moment when the first recipe video was playing on the Show,” says Hannes Hegewald, Product Manager at Kitchen Stories. “We all were very happy to see our videos running on the screen, just by asking Alexa to play them.”

With the announcement of new Alexa-enabled devices and updates to the Smart Home Skill API, there’s never been a better time to get involved with Alexa. We can’t wait to see what you build next. 

Start Building for Echo Show

For more information about building skills using Alexa Skills Kit and Echo Show, check out the following resources:

• Echo Show Product Details - UK
• Echo Show Product Details - DE 
• Echo Show Developer Tools
• Best Practices for Skill Card Design
• Including a Card in Your Skill's Response

Build Engaging Skills Your Customers Will Love 

Learn how to build a standout skill your customers will love. Attend our upcoming webinar to learn the qualities of the top-performing skills in the Alexa Skills Store. Register now for the upcoming UK/Germany session. Then use the new lessons learned to publish a new skill in September and earn Alexa developer perks in UK and Germany.