With the arrival of Echo Show, the Allrecipes team leveraged the new built-in display templates in the Alexa Skills Kit to offer visual content including streaming video. The result: Allrecipes’ tried-and-true skill for Alexa enriched with beautiful visual aids on the Echo Show screen.

Today, we’re excited to announce Alexa’s participation again at AWS re:Invent 2017, the largest gathering of the global Amazon developer community.

Last year, we introduced the Flash Briefing Skill API in October 2016 to enable you to add content feeds to flash briefing on Alexa in the form of pre-recorded audio and text-to-speech (TTS). Since then, we have seen a steady increase in the number of flash briefing skill submissions. To help you...

A visual user interface can be a great complement to a voice-first user experience. In this blog post, we’ll walk you through how to build an Alexa skill using the core developer capabilities of Echo Show.

Echo Show, Amazon’s new device that brings you everything you love about Alexa, is now shipping to customers in the US. While your skills will work out of the box, we know that many of you want to augment existing skills by creating unique visual experiences for Echo Show.

Today, we are happy to announce that you can enable customers to view live video feeds from their smart home cameras on Echo Show with the Smart Home Skill API.

“Most of the time, our customers want to know what is happening right then at a certain location,” says Naveen Chhangani, Senior Director of Product Management at Arlo. “With Echo Show, there is no dependency on the phone or the app; the results are immediate.”

Ring, which makes outdoor home security products, built a skill for Alexa using the new camera capability in the Smart Home Skill API. This skill enables Ring customer to say, “Alexa, show me the front door,” then be able to see and listen to the visitor at the front door on Echo Show.

Today, we are incredibly excited to announce a new feature for Alexa developers to take advantage of: entity resolution. This enables you to define synonyms for the Alexa Service to resolve rather than having to figure this out in your code.

For my dad's birthday, Alexa played him 30 warm messages from loved ones around the world. He called it "the best birthday gift I ever got."

“We've been thinking about voice for quite some time,” says John Ouseph, GE Appliances’ technology manager for Connected Appliances. “There just wasn't a really clear path to market until Alexa came out.”

This is part six and the final blog of our Makers Academy series for Ruby developers. Learn more about this free training on the Alexa Skills Kit and read part one, part two, part three, part four, and part five. 

When Alexa made its German debut in 2016, mytaxi, a taxi-hailing service, knew voice-first experiences would change the way people interact with its devices and services.

„Als Alexa 2016 in Deutschland eingeführt wurde, wusste das Team von mytaxi, dass Sprachassistenten („Voice first“) ein neues Interaktionsniveau mit Geräten und Dienstleistungen ermöglichen würden.“

Today we announced the Video Skill API, a new addition to the Alexa Skills Kit. Companies can now teach Alexa how to interface with their video content and services. And you can build experiences that allow your customers to easily find and consume video content without invoking a specific skill.