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The Category SDK enables a plug-and-play developer experience for building native voice and visual experiences on Alexa+ across supported categories such as Restaurant Reservation, Food Ordering, Home Services, Local Booking, Ticketing, and Ride Booking. When you build with the Category SDK, you inherit production-ready customer experiences — including multi-turn dialogue flows, customer experience design, long-term memory tracking, response generation tuning, and native integration into Alexa+ services (such as Payments and Calendar) — all handled out of the box.

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Decide how you want to implement your category add-on

The Category SDK offers two integration paths. Both paths connect your service to the same pre-built Alexa+ customer experience for a given category. The difference is how your service communicates with Alexa+.

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Category Action Add-on

With a Category Action Add-on, you connect your APIs to Alexa+ through pre-defined service provider interfaces (SPIs). These SPIs establish clear and reliable contracts between your services and Alexa+, delivering consistent performance with low latency and strong resilience to future changes. This path is best suited for partners who:
  • Have well-established APIs for their service
  • Want a structured, contract-based integration
  • Need the lowest possible latency
For details, see Create a Category Add-on Using an AI Coding Agent or Create a Category Add-on Manually with the CLI.

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Category MCP Add-on

With a Category MCP Add-on, you connect your MCP server to the same pre-built Alexa+ customer experience. Instead of mapping to SPIs, your MCP server exposes tools that Alexa+ invokes through the standard Model Context Protocol. Alexa+ still provides the full customer experience — the difference is in how your service receives and responds to requests. This path is best suited for partners who:
  • Already have an MCP server or prefer the MCP standard
  • Want flexibility in how they expose their capabilities
  • Are building for a category that supports MCP integration
For details, see Create a Category MCP Add-on.

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Supported categories

You can build category add-ons for the following categories:

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How it works

Regardless of which path you choose, the overall experience is the same from the customer’s perspective:
  1. Alexa+ customer initiates interaction — Makes a voice or text request to Alexa+ expressing an intent to use a service (for example, booking a restaurant or ordering food).
  2. Alexa+ processes the request — Analyzes the utterance, routes the intent to the appropriate service, and determines the response using the pre-built customer experience.
  3. Alexa+ customer engages in dialog — Clarifies intent, adds context, and refines the request through natural conversation with Alexa+. The pre-built customer experience handles the full dialogue flow.
  4. Your service fulfills the request — Alexa+ calls your APIs (Action add-on) or invokes your MCP tools (MCP add-on) to complete the transaction.

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Your experience as a developer

  1. Set up and implement your integration:
    • Configure necessary parameters
    • Implement SPIs (Action add-on) or connect your MCP server to Alexa+ (MCP add-on)
    • Test locally
  2. Deploy your add-on:
    • Use the Alexa AI CLI to deploy to Alexa+
    • Deploy your business logic to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
  3. Test your add-on:
    • Validate your integration using the web simulator
    • Perform end-to-end testing with an Alexa device
  4. Launch:
    • Complete certification requirements
    • Publish the service
    • Monitor performance and user feedback

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Category SDK workflow

The following diagram illustrates the Category SDK workflow. Diagram showing how a request flows from the user to a Category SDK add-on
Last modified on August 3, 2026