Editor’s Note: This is an installment of a new series that showcases the top developer tips, tutorials, and educational resources to help you build incredible Alexa skills. Follow the series to learn, get inspired, and start building your own voice experiences for Alexa.

Combining voice and visual experiences can make Alexa skills even more delightful, engaging, and simple for customers. When you build a multimodal experience, you combine voice, touch, text, images, graphics, audio, and video in a single user interface. The result is voice-first experience complemented by visuals. The experience should remain conversational and voice forward, rather than a series of menus or a voice-controlled commands. It should also lead with voice, making use of graphics and touch for richer interactions.

The new Alexa Presentation Language (APL) makes it easier for you to build voice-first, visual Alexa skills that can adapt to different Alexa-enabled devices with screens. To help you get started with APL faster to build multimodal skills, check out our top resources below.

40 Great APL Skills

Developers all over the world are already building engaging multimodal experiences with APL. Check out these great APL skills, then get inspired to build your own.

Alexa Design Guide

Sound, voice, and visuals are at the heart of designing for Alexa across devices. The Alexa Design Guide is a shared repository of sound, voice, visual, and device best practices, patterns, and guidelines you can use when building innovative Alexa-enabled experiences. Check out the guide to dive deeper in to multimodal skill design.

How to Get Started with the Alexa Presentation Language (APL)

APL is a voice-first design language you can use to create rich, interactive displays for Alexa skills and tailor the experience for tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices. Using APL, you can easily build customized, robust displays that coincide with your personal brand and the context of your voice experience. Borrowing concepts found in traditional web development, like styling, component nesting, and document hierarchy, APL provides you with the tools you need to build rich, flexible, adaptable, and easy-to-use skills for customers. Check out this blog post to get started with APL.  

How to Design Visual Components for Voice-First Alexa Skills

With the recent release of the all-new Echo Show and the introduction of Alexa on Fire TV Cube, there are now tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices with screens available to customers. With APL, developers can easily add visuals to skills and build engaging multimodal voice experiences in a responsive way, while tailoring the skill to each device to enhance the customer experience. Follow these steps to start designing your multimodal experience.

10 Tips for Designing Alexa Skills with Visual Responses

When designing a multimodal skill, there are many things to consider and design best practices to follow. Mainly, you have to consider the overall customer experience, how users will benefit, and how they will engage across voice and visuals. Read our blog post on 10 tip for designing Alexa skills with visual responses and the design checklist to learn more. 

Developer Spotlight: Steven Arkonovich

With over 60,000 active monthly users and a 50% conversion rate for an in-skill subscription, Alexa Champion Steven Arkonovich has figured out how to grow and monetize his popular Big Sky weather skill. When he heard about APL for building multimodal skills, Arkonovich saw an opportunity to evolve Big Sky into a more engaging, voice-first. Read the case study and watch the video below to learn how he is expanding what his skill can do, reaching more customers on Alexa-enabled devices, and growing his voice business with APL.

Enter the Alexa Skills Challenge: Multimodal

In addition to building a visually rich Alexa skill with APL, you can enter the Alexa Skills Challenge: Multimodal with Devpost and compete for cash prizes and Amazon devices. We invite you to participate and build voice-first multimodal experiences that customers can enjoy across tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices with screens. Learn more, start building APL skills, and enter the challenge by January 22.