Overview of the Category SDK

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.

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+.

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.

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.

Supported categories

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

Category	Description	Supported by
Food ordering	Lets users order food from your service.	Action
Home services	Lets users book home services with you.	Action
Local booking	Lets users book local services and activities.	Action
Restaurant reservations	Lets users book a restaurant reservation with your service.	Action
Ride booking	Lets users book rides with your service.	MCP
Ticketing	Lets users purchase tickets for events.	Action

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.

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

Category SDK workflow

The following diagram illustrates the Category SDK workflow.

Related topics

• Set Up Your Development Environment
• Create a Category Add-on Using an AI Coding Agent
• Create a Category Add-on Manually with the CLI
• Create a Category MCP Add-on
• Alexa AI CLI Reference

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Last updated: Jul 14, 2026