The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs and tools that make it fast and easy for you to create new voice-driven capabilities for Alexa. Alexa is the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, a new category of device designed around your voice. With a few lines of code, you can easily integrate existing web services with Alexa or, in just a few hours, you can build entirely new experiences designed around voice. No experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding is required—Amazon does all the work to hear, understand, and process the customer’s spoken request so you don’t have to.

This free 38 minute video will introduce you to the capabilities of the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) using an Amazon Echo device and walk through building your own Skills for Alexa. AWS Lambda will be used as an example hosted cloud service and can be followed along using the AWS free tier at no cost to you. After watching the video you will have an understanding of the Alexa Skills Kit and be able to publish an Alexa Skill that can be enabled on an Amazon Echo device.

You can watch the video here and download the slides here.

New Developer Opportunities

With the launch of the Alexa Skills Kit you have a unique opportunity to create new Alexa skills customers can teach their Alexa enabled devices, like the Amazon Echo. By submitting your Alexa skill today you will be ready when we launch the first new capabilities built using ASK later this year. We can’t wait to see what you create!

You may also want to check out these additional Alexa developer resources:

• Order Echo - Amazon.com Page
• Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
• Alexa Voice Service (AVS)
• Alexa Fund
• Alexa Developer Forums
• Getting Started with the Alexa Skills Kit
• Alexa Skills Kit Voice Design Handbook
• Create a developer account on the Amazon Appstore

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

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