Echo Show is a new device that brings you everything you love about Alexa, and now she can show you things. Customers just ask and they can see photos, watch videos, review lists, and much more. This opens up new opportunities for skill developers to create engaging experiences. We are excited to see what you create.

We designed Echo Show so that the screen augments and enhances what skills offer to customers. You can complement your skill interactions with imagery, blocks of text, video, list navigation and selection, touch input, and more. We provide visual templates and skill directives that you can use in your skills. Since customers can now choose whether to speak or listen, see or touch, or combinations of all, you’ll want to spend the extra time to define the right experience.

7 Tips for Creating Great Skills for Echo Show

You can learn more about the Echo Show in our Voice Design Guide. Get started now with these tips:

1. Get creative with what's new about Echo Show. Now that a screen is available, you can add relevant content and functionality to your skill using high-quality images, text, and video to expand the experience and make it more enjoyable. Make sure you own the rights to them. For all images and video, make sure the sizes are such that they load quickly. Blur background images lightly and apply a black (#000000) layer set at 70% opacity to allow text to be easily read.
2. Get inspired by the updated skills released with the Echo Show. Allrecipes, Bloomberg, Uber, Jeopardy, and other skills have been updated to take advantage of the device capabilities. Enable and use them to experience how the screen makes great experiences even better.
3. Design so Echo Show can be used from a distance. Make the primary content of each template visible and recognizable from up to 7 feet away. Customers can use Echo Show from across the kitchen or even when they cannot easily see it. Skills need to support these possibilities.
4. Use the visual templates to maintain consistency. To create screens that enhance the use of voice, use the templates we have provided. They make it easy to offer visual output that supports and enhances the voice-first experience of your skill.
5. Match skill responses with screens. For each response in your skill, create a screen that matches the content and allows appropriate voice and touch actions for selection, scrolling, video control, and navigation.
6. Use text clearly and succinctly. When displaying text, keep the messages short and to the point for easy and quick reading. Make it similar though not necessarily the same as the Text-To-Speech (TTS) output so that it reinforces rather than duplicates what the skill is saying.
7. Use hints and help so customers know what they can say. Hints are useful to help customers get to know your skill and to try other features. Write hints in this format: ‘Try “Alexa, [command or question].”’ For example, ‘Try “Alexa, what’s playing nearby?”’ Creating a help screen lets you offer examples of what your skill responds to and can do.

Check Out the Amazon Alexa Voice Design Guide

We have updated the Amazon Alexa Voice Design Guide with additional design practices and guidelines to help you deliver with the new capabilities using the new Echo Show visual templates. Visit the guide.

Build a Skill, Get an Echo Dot and New Alexa Swag

Leverage the new developer tools and documentation in the Alexa Skills Kit to build skills for Echo Show. Developers have built more than 15,000 skills with the Alexa Skills Kit. Explore the stories behind some of these innovations, then start building your own skill. If you’re serious about getting into building voice UIs, we’d like to help you explore. If you publish a skill in July and apply for our promotion, we’ll send you an Echo Dot and some new Alexa swag so you can experiment and daydream.