We’re pleased to announce our collaboration with Makers Academy on a new Alexa Skills Kit training course for Ruby developers.

Makers Academy is a leading web developer bootcamp based in London, UK. Its highly-selective, full-time program teaches the principles of software craftsmanship. Makers Academy has graduated over 700 students into their dream jobs as junior developers.

We believe natural user interfaces such as those based on speech represent the next major disruption in computing. Now is a great time for developers to take advantage of this new form of interaction and to learn to build voice-first experiences for Alexa, the voice service that powers Amazon Echo. Makers Academy’s mission is to teach students the most used technologies in today's marketplace, and we’re excited to team up to prepare you for the future of voice computing.

In the next few weeks, we’ll deliver a new, free training course on building custom skills for Alexa. This particular training will focus on Ruby, a general-purpose programming language that is an intuitive route into programming. You’ll learn how to set up Alexa web interactions in Ruby, work with intents, utterances, and slots, and prepare to build more complex Alexa skills with features like session storage and persistence.

Makers Academy is thrilled to help bring next-generation voice interface programming to the Ruby community.

“Amazon Alexa offers a great set of innovative product opportunities at the cutting edge of modern technology,” said Sam Morgan, Head of Education at Makers Academy. “This training course will provide a quick and easy on-ramp for novice and expert Ruby developers alike to build Alexa skills, deploy them for Alexa users, and work with authentication and authorisation technologies -- all within the framework of play and discovery that the Ruby community so loves.”

Get ready to learn. 

Build a Skill, Get a Shirt

The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) enables developers to build capabilities, called skills, for Alexa. ASK is a collection of self-service APIs, documentation, templates, and code samples that make it fast and easy for anyone to add skills to Alexa. 

Developers have built more than 10,000 skills with ASK. Explore the stories behind some of these innovations, then start building your own skill. Once you publish your skill, mark the occasion with a free, limited-edition Alexa dev shirt. Quantities are limited.