Soon you will be able to use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Music Skill API to stream from your music service to Alexa customers in the US. The Music Skill API gives you access to the capabilities and features that other music providers such as Spotify, Pandora, Saavn, and Deezer use today. With these APIs, you can enable your customers to access your entire music catalog via voice on tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices from Amazon and other manufacturers. To learn more and signup to be notified when the API is available, click here.
Customers are increasingly using voice interfaces as a hands-free way to listen to music. By using Alexa’s built-in music capabilities, you will make it easier for your customers to engage with your service just by asking. With the Music Skill API, you can enable your customers to play music by simply saying, for example, “Alexa, play songs by <artist> from <your music service>.” You do not need to build your own voice user interface; instead, you simply provide your music catalog metadata to Amazon on a regular basis, and we automatically update the Alexa voice model and grammars used by customers. This enables you to deliver a reliable and accurate voice experience without requiring automatic speech recognition expertise on your team.
Once you build and publish a music skill, your customers can stream to any Amazon Echo or other Alexa-enabled device, or to multiple Echo devices using multi-room music. They can also use visual search on Echo Show and Echo Spot, and use music in your catalog for alarms. You can control the experience with skip limits and stream protection, and monitor and improve ongoing skill performance using event metrics including skill enablement and disablement, account linking, and music playback. Best of all, once the Music Skill API is available, you can develop your skill in a completely self-service manner using the Alexa Skills Kit.
TIDAL and several other music service providers are already using the Music Skill API and expect to launch skills later this year. “It's TIDAL’s priority to provide members with easy access to our platform so they can have a seamless listening experience, wherever they are,” said Lior Tibon, Chief Operating Officer at TIDAL. “We’re excited to be the first streaming platform to take advantage of Amazon’s innovative self-service Music Skill API and bring TIDAL to Alexa-enabled devices.”
The Music Skill API will be available to developers soon. To learn more and signup to be notified when the API is available, click here.