It started with Sam Machin’s brainchild, Alexa in the Browser. Born late last year at a hackathon, the project served as an inspiration for Echosim.io – a new online community tool for developers that simulates the look and feel of an Amazon Echo. With 3D JavaScript animations and Alexa Voice Service (AVS) integration, Echosim.io gives users the ability to experience a realistic interaction with Alexa capabilities and skills.

Echosim.io lives in your browser, so anyone, anywhere can access it and test their Alexa skills. You no longer need an Alexa-enabled device to test your skills. Developers worldwide can use Echosim.io to experience Alexa. Its simplicity makes it easy for anyone to understand what an Echo is and what it does without having to explain Alexa’s unique UX.

Try Echosim.io for yourself. Simply visit the website and log in with your Amazon account. If you want to test your Alexa skill, be sure to log in with your developer account. Click and hold the microphone button and speak a command. For example, say “Alexa, what’s the weather today?” When you let go of the button, Echosim.io processes and responds to your voice command – give it a try.

The Alexa Voice Service integration puts the power of Alexa behind the 3D Javascript animations. AVS enables you to integrate Alexa's built-in voice capabilities into your connected products. Carve your own little corner in IoT with a speaker and mic, a microcomputer, and the self-service tools at developer.amazon.com. What would you do with Alexa and a Raspberry Pi?

Haven’t built a skill yet? Get started with our step-by-step tutorials and build your first skill in under an hour.

• Trivia Skill template - A great place to start for any first time Alexa skills developer. This tutorial steps you through the end-to-end process of building a solid trivia skill and submitting it for certification.
• Fact Skill template - Another easy tutorial for both developers and non-developers to build an Alexa skill similar to "fact of the day" or "flash cards". 
• How-to Skill template - This tutorial makes it easy to create a simple, direction-based skill for Alexa.

Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service, powers voice experiences on millions of devices, including Amazon Echo and Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. Today, Amazon brings Alexa to more devices with its two newest additions: Echo Dot and Amazon Tap. Echo Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that enables you to add Alexa to any room. Amazon Tap is an Alexa-enabled portable speaker.

Amazon Echo Dot: Add Alexa to Any Room

Echo Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that uses the same far-field voice recognition as Amazon Echo. Dot has a built-in speaker and also connects over Bluetooth or with the included audio cable to your own speaker. Echo Dot ($89.99) is available exclusively for Prime Members through Alexa Voice Shopping. To order your Echo Dot, use your Echo or Fire TV and just ask: “Alexa, order Echo Dot.”

Alexa—the brain behind Echo Dot—is built in the cloud, so it is always getting smarter. The more you use Dot, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences. And because Echo Dot is always connected, updates are delivered automatically. Third-party skills from developers add even more capabilities like ordering a pizza from Domino's, requesting a ride from Uber, opening your garage with Garageio, and more. Enabling skills lets your Echo Dot do even more—simply discover and enable the skills you want to use in the Alexa App.

We are happy to announce two frequently requested Alexa Skills Kit features are now live! Starting today you can take advantage of Account Linking allowing customers to easily link their accounts with yours and a new Service Simulator for testing your skill.

What is Account Linking?

With the Alexa Skills Kit, you can now easily allow your customers to link their existing accounts with you, to Alexa. To link accounts, customers visit the skills tab in the Amazon Alexa app and enable your skill. They are then prompted to log in to your site using their normal credentials. You authenticate the customer and generate an access token that uniquely identifies the customer and link the accounts.

Setting Up Account Linking in Your Alexa Skill

To connect an Alexa user with an account in your system, you need to provide an access token that uniquely identifies the user within your system. The Alexa Skills Kit uses an OAuth 2.0 implicit grant authorization to obtain this access token. The resource server and authorization server are both part of your system and the client seeking access is the Alexa service. Once an Alexa user grants the Alexa service access to the resource server, the Alexa service stores the access token. This token is then included in requests sent to your skill.

I recently sat down with fellow evangelist Jeff Barr and we chatted about all things Alexa. We covered the Amazon Echo, the new Alexa Skills Kit and creating new skills with the AWS Lambda compute service. If you’ve been looking to get started with Alexa this podcast episode only runs about 23 minutes and is a great place to begin.

You can listen or download the episode right here.

You can subscribe to the AWS Podcast using the following links:

Subscribe via RSS
Subscribe via iTunes
Subscribe via Stitcher
Follow @AWSPodcast on Twitter

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

An Introduction to the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
Free Video Training - An Introduction to Amazon Echo and the Alexa Skills Kit
Creating an Amazon Echo Adventure Game with the Alexa Skills Kit
Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
Alexa Voice Service (AVS)
Alexa Fund

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

To help jumpstart your Alexa Skills Kit development we have created a knowledge base of answers to top questions posted in our Alexa Skills Kit forums. If you are just starting out, this list is a great place to get quick answers to common questions around building Alexa skills you may have.

While working with the Alexa platform over the last few months, it occurred to me that some of my favorite text games could be made more accessible to today’s game players through voice control. There has been a resurgence of text based, narrative gaming; and access by voice takes the experience to a whole new level of interaction. Successful video games have solid characters and background stories that are driven by conflict. Text based games rely even more heavily on their story. And the voice interaction enabled by Alexa provides for an extremely intimate dialogue between the gamer and the game.

Watch the Alexa adventure game on YouTube here.

Voice User Interface

Dialogue is the User Experience for voice based games and so it is where you will spend most of your time when designing the game interactions. While the speech-to-text capabilities of the Alexa platform are impressive, it is important to simplify the customer controls so the game can not mistake the gamer’s instructions. As part of developing an Alexa skill, you define the syntax and provide sample utterances. Syntax defines the available customer intents and the sample utterances help the Alexa platform map speech to those intents.

Making Choices

Suppose you want to interact with the gamer through simple choices. You can present the gamer with a set of multiple choices and enable them to select one of them. This is the simplest form of control and leaves very little chance of getting the gamer’s selection wrong. Let’s say that you’ve written your voice response to be:

Alexa: “You are standing on a dusty road with a large, vibrant lake to one side and a dark forest to the other.

Would you like to:

1.       Walk north along the road?

2.       Walk south along the road?

3.       Dive into the lake?

4.       Enter the forest?”

Gamer: “Choose 1”

The most straightforward user experience enables the gamer to simply say “1,” “2,” “3,” or “4” and have game play progress based on that choice. To define this Voice User Interface (VUI) with Alexa, I create a choice intent and sample utterances such as:

{

      "intent": "ChoiceIntent",

      "slots": [

                {

                    "name": "ChoiceValue",

                    "type": "LITERAL"

                } ]

    }

And some sample utterances to map to that schema:

ChoiceIntent   {a|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {b|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {c|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {d|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {one|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {two|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {to|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {too|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {three|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {four|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {next|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   {continue|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   choose {a|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   select {b|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   option {c|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   try {d|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   choose {e|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   select {one|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   option {two|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   try {three|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   choose {four|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   select {first one|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   try {last one|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   choose {first|ChoiceValue}

ChoiceIntent   select {last|ChoiceValue}

Direction Commands

A more advanced interface would enable the gamer to give commands like “Go North,” “Enter the Forest,” or other simple commands. And a more open-ended style of play would only give the gamer the situation and not the option. The last style is much more in line with many text-based games:

Alexa: “You are standing on a dusty road with a large, vibrant lake on one side and a dark forest to the other.”

Gamer: “Jump in the lake.”

Alexa: “You drown. Would you like to be revived and try again?”

Clearly the game needs to understand where the gamer’s directional command will take them and handle an invalid choice appropriately or in some entertaining manner. In this case, I really don’t want the lake to be an option, so if you go into it you are sure to drown. For the other options, the game will take the gamer to the next scene and change the state of the game.

To handle direction commands within my games, I have defined the direction intent with this simple schema:

{

      "intent": "DirectionIntent",

      "slots": [

                {

                    "name": "DirectionVerb",

                    "type": "LITERAL"

                },

                {

                    "name": "Direction",

                    "type": "LITERAL"

                },

                {

                    "name": "Destination",

                    "type": "LITERAL"

                } ]

    }

The sample utterances are key to defining what the Alexa platform will identify as a directional intent from the gamer. These are some of the ones I use:

DirectionIntent   {north|Direction}

DirectionIntent   {south|Direction}

DirectionIntent   {east|Direction}

DirectionIntent   {west|Direction}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} {east|Direction}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} {home|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} to the {west|Direction}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} {northeast|Direction} to {house|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {move|DirectionVerb} {southeast|Direction} to {castle|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {head|DirectionVerb} {northwest|Direction} to {mountain|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {travel|DirectionVerb} {southwest|Direction} to {stronghold|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} {down|Direction} to the {river|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {move|DirectionVerb} {up|Direction} to the {riverbank|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {head|DirectionVerb} {sideways|Direction} to the {ocean|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {travel|DirectionVerb} {left|Direction} to the {lake|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} {right|Direction} toward {cave|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {move|DirectionVerb} {around|Direction} toward {spider|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {head|DirectionVerb} {quickly|Direction} toward {chair|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {travel|DirectionVerb} {slowly|Direction} toward {table|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} {directly|Direction} toward the {desk|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {move|DirectionVerb} {north|Direction} toward the {terminal|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {head|DirectionVerb} {south|Direction} toward the {computer|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {jump|DirectionVerb} {up|Direction} toward the {beer|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {crawl|DirectionVerb} to {house|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {slither|DirectionVerb} to {park|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {wander|DirectionVerb} to {door|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {saunter|DirectionVerb} to {box|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {sprint|DirectionVerb} to the {chest|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {race|DirectionVerb} to the {portal|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {dance|DirectionVerb} to the {tree|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {travel|DirectionVerb} to the {rock|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} toward {monster|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {move|DirectionVerb} toward {vampire|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {head|DirectionVerb} toward {balrog|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {travel|DirectionVerb} toward {orc|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {go|DirectionVerb} toward the {elf|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {move|DirectionVerb} toward the {dwarf|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {head|DirectionVerb} toward the {wraith|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {travel|DirectionVerb} toward the {sun|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {dive|DirectionVerb} into the {lake|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {jump|DirectionVerb} in the {pond|Destination}

DirectionIntent   {enter|DirectionVerb} the {forest|Destination}

Combat Commands

So far the gamer can move around in the game, and that can be enough if we’re taking them through a multiple ending story where they are limited to specific storylines. If they want to interact with other characters or perhaps fight monsters, they will need to be able to give commands that tell the game what they want to fight (combat target), what they want to use (combat weapon), and how they want to use it (combat verb). This is how I have developed the schema for my combat intent:

{

      "intent": "CombatIntent",

      "slots": [

                {

                    "name": "CombatVerb",

                    "type": "LITERAL"

                },

                {

                    "name": "CombatTarget",

                    "type": "LITERAL"

                },

                {

                    "name": "CombatWeapon",

                    "type": "LITERAL"

                } ]

    }

And the sample utterances for any set of combat I may want to support in my game:

CombatIntent   {hit|CombatVerb} {monster|CombatTarget} with {sword|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {stab|CombatVerb} {dragon|CombatTarget} with the {knife|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {poke|CombatVerb} {balrog|CombatTarget} with a {stick|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {insult|CombatVerb} the {mugger|CombatTarget} with {rocks|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {slap|CombatVerb} the {orc|CombatTarget} with the {arrow|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {flick|CombatVerb} the {fairy|CombatTarget} with a {stare|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {kick|CombatVerb} {dwarf|CombatTarget}

CombatIntent   {slaughter|CombatVerb} {pig|CombatTarget}

CombatIntent   {strike|CombatVerb} the {vampire|CombatTarget}

CombatIntent   {smack|CombatVerb} the {dog|CombatTarget} with a {donut|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {taunt|CombatVerb} the {cat|CombatTarget} with a {shoe|CombatWeapon}

CombatIntent   {annoy|CombatVerb} the {bear|CombatTarget} with a {branch|CombatWeapon}

Game Text Recognition Heuristics

The important thing to your game is that the correct intent is identified and that each slot has a value that it can recognize and respond to. The more sample utterances you provide, the better the recognition quality becomes through the Alexa platform. Until the quality reaches a certain level, game play can become quite frustrating for the gamer. Make sure to test the utterances you are most likely to expect from the gamer and do what you can to accept words that are close enough.

If the gamer says, “Hit the ogre with rocks,” it is possible that Alexa hears “Hit the ogre with rock.” The very subtle difference between “rocks” and “rock” should be handled by your game.

You may need to employ more advanced forms of recognition heuristics within your game in order to account for these variances in the speech to text mapping from Alexa. The Alexa platform is also continually improving its audio recognition heuristics and improves over time as more complex speech is presented to it. In just a few weeks of using some of my basic games, I have found that recognition has improved significantly.

New Game Developer Opportunities

With the launch of the Alexa Skills Kit you have a unique opportunity to create new Alexa gaming 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!

To get more details on how to get started, check out this Introduction to Amazon Echo and the Alexa Skills Kit by Dave Isbitski.

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

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

++David (@PlusDavid)

Want the latest app and game news delivered to your inbox? Stay in the loop on the latest industry best practices, Amazon promotions, and new launches by subscribing to our weekly blog summary here.

We recently launched the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), 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 same 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.

It’s Easy to Get Started

To get started with the Alexa Skills Kit, we recommend you review the following materials in order:

1. Read the Getting Started Guide, which details how users interact with your Alexa skill and how to conduct a conversation with your customers.
2. Review AWS Lambda Documentation
3. Check out the Voice Design Handbook for best practices on voice user interface design.
4. Review the Alexa Skills Interface Reference to learn more about the syntax of the requests that will be sent to your service.
5. Check out the reference skills to see sample code.
6. Learn how to test your new skill with an Amazon Echo.
7. Sign up for a free account and register your skill on the developer portal.
    

Watch the Video
 

You should also check out this free 38 minute video that will introduce you to the capabilities of the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) using an Amazon Echo device and walk you through building your own skills for Alexa. We use AWS Lambda as an example hosted cloud service – you can follow along at no cost using the AWS free tier. 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.
 

How Customers Will Interact with Your Alexa Skill

Customers interact with the Alexa skills you develop by asking a question or stating a command in natural language. The user says a supported phrase such as “ask,” an invocation name that identifies the capability that the user wants to use, and then a specific request or question:

User: “Alexa, ask Greeter to say hello world.”

The above example breaks down like this:

• “Alexa” is the wake word for the Amazon Echo. This starts the user’s conversation with Alexa.
• “Ask…to” is one of the supported phrases for requesting a particular ability. There are several phrases that end users can say, such as “ask..to,” “ask…for,” “tell…to,” and many other variations listed in Supported Phrases to Begin a Conversation.
• “Greeter” is the invocation name that identifies the capability the user wants. The name should be chosen to fit well into “ask”, “tell” or the other supported phrases, and does not need to stand alone as a phrase. Alexa uses this to determine where to send the user’s request.

·         “Say hello” is the specific request, question, or command mapped to a particular intent for the service.

In this context, an intent represents a high-level action that fulfills a user’s spoken request. Intents can optionally have arguments called slots that collect additional information needed to fulfill the user’s request. Intents are specific to Alexa and do not share the same structure as Android intents.

Defining the phrases users speak to make requests and the corresponding intents mapped to those phrases is part of defining the voice interface for an Alexa skill. For details, see Defining the Voice Interface.

The service that implements the particular skill constructs an appropriate response to the intent and sends it back. This reply can include both text that Alexa converts to speech and information to display in a graphical card in the Amazon Echo App, which is available for Fire OS, Android, iOS, and through web browsers. Alexa converts the provided text to speech and reads it back to the user. If you include information for a card, Alexa also sends the card to the user’s Echo App.

The following diagram illustrates the flow of a user's command:

How do I create an Alexa Skill?

To give Alexa new capabilities, you need the following:

• An account on the developer portal. You use the developer portal to create a configuration for the new ability that includes the information the Alexa service needs to route requests to your service.
• The ability to develop and deploy a cloud-based service to an Internet-accessible endpoint. The service processes user intents and returns replies to the user. For details, see Deciding How to Host Your Cloud-based Service.
• A development environment appropriate for the language you plan to use. You can author a Lambda function in Node.js or Java. You can author a web service in any language appropriate for web services.
   

Configuring Your Alexa Skill Through the Developer Portal

Registering a new skill or ability on the Amazon Developer Portal creates a configuration containing the information that the Alexa service needs to do the following:

• Route requests to the web service or AWS Lambda function that implements the skill. AWS Lambda is a service offering by Amazon Web Services.
• Display information about the new capability in the Amazon Echo App.

Note - You must register a skill before you can test it with an Echo device.

Customers will never interact with your Cloud-based service directly, instead all of their requests will go to the Amazon Alexa Service which in turn will create http post requests your service handles using a predefined contract you have set up.  

This contract is set up in the developer portal and you will need to define interactions for your Alexa skill through Intent Schemas

•       Each intent consists of two fields. The intent field gives the name of the intent. The slots field lists the slots associated with that intent.
•       Slots can also include types such as LITERAL, NUMBER, DATE, etc.

Here is an example of what an Intent Schema can look like:

The mappings between the intents you define and the spoken utterances that invoke those intents are provided in a tab-separated text document of sample utterances.

•       Each possible phrase is assigned to one of the defined intents.
•       GetHoroscope what is the horoscope for {pisces|Sign}
•       GetHoroscope what will the horoscope for {leo|Sign} be {next tuesday|Date}

Here is an example of a sample utterance:

The Alexa Service will use these configurations to know how to call your cloud-based service endpoint and to understand how your customer will be talking to an Alexa-enabled device like Echo.

Note – The more sample utterances you include the better Alexa will be able to understand your customers.  Make sure you include as many utterances as you can with different samples of data.
 

Setting up Your Cloud Based Service

Now that you have configured the Alexa skill in the developer portal you will next need to ensure your cloud based service is capable of the following:

·         Uses HTTP over SSL/TLS on port 443
·         Must be Internet-accessible
·         Presents a trusted certificate matching domain name

Once you have set up the configuration for your Alexa skill in the Developer portal your cloud-based service endpoint will be called by the Amazon Alexa Service.  This will happen in the following manner:

·         You will need to handle POST requests to your service over port 443 and parse the JSON
·         You will need to check the session variable to see if the user started a new session or if request is from existing one
·         Requests always Include a type, requestId and timestamp
·         requestId maps directly to  LaunchRequest, IntentRequest and SessionEndedRequest

Here is an example of what a request HTTP header will look like:

Here an example of the request body sent to your service in JSON format:

*Note – AWS Lambda now includes a code template that will automatically handle all of these requests for you and does not require the creation of an SSL certificate. For more information on creating an Alexa AWS Lambda compute function click here.
 

Developer Samples Included in the Alexa Skills Kit

We have included both Java-based Web Service examples and Node JS Javascript examples as part of the Alexa Skills Kit. In addition to these samples, we provide a complete walk through on how to create your own service to handle Alexa requests as a Web Service using Java and how to create a compute function in AWS Lambda to service Alexa requests.

The Java Web Based Service example provides a Hello World example.

The Node JS Lambda samples provide an array of scenarios including database access and storing session attributes.  Here is a complete list of the samples available to download. 

If you configure your app as a Lambda function, the Alexa service executes your function when a user makes a request. Your function then returns the response. Using a Lambda function for your app eliminates some of the complexity around setting up and managing your own endpoint:

• You do not need to administer or manage any of the compute resources for your app.
• You do not need an SSL certificate.
• You do not need to verify that requests are coming from the Amazon Alexa service yourself. Access to execute your function is controlled by permissions within AWS instead.

You can download the AWS Lambda Node JS samples here and the Java AWS Beanstalk samples here.

New Developer Opportunities

With the launch of the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) you have a unique opportunity to create new Alexa skills that 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:

Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
Alexa Developer Forums
Getting Started with the Alexa Skills Kit
Alexa Skills Kit Voice Design Handbook
Create a developer account on the Amazon Appstore
Free Video Training - An Introduction to Amazon Echo and the Alexa Skills Kit

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Want the latest app and game news delivered to your inbox? Stay in the loop on the latest industry best practices, Amazon promotions, and new launches by subscribing to our weekly blog summary here.

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)

Want the latest app and game news delivered to your inbox? Stay in the loop on the latest industry best practices, Amazon promotions, and new launches by subscribing to our weekly blog summary here.