Alexa Skills on Echo Show

All Alexa skills will automatically be available on Echo Show. Skills will display any skill cards you currently return in your response objects. This is very similar to how customers see your Alexa skill cards on the Alexa app, Fire TV, and Fire Tablet devices today. If no skill card is available, a default template shows the skill icon and skill name.

Effective skill cards help increase customer engagement with skills on devices with screens. Review our best practices for skill card design.

New Developer Tools Coming Soon

Soon, we’ll make updates to the Alexa Skills Kit that make it easy for you to optimize your skills for the screen and connect smart home cameras to Alexa.

• Build Optimized Display and Video Interfaces. While your skills will work out of the box, we know that you may want to create visual experiences unique to Echo Show. You develop skills for Echo Show in the Alexa Skills Kit, just like you do for other Alexa devices with a screen today. When we introduce display interfaces in ASK later this summer, you’ll be able to choose from several GUI templates for your skill. You will also be able to stream videos on Echo Show using the new video player interfaces in the Alexa Skills Kit. You will simply provide a URL and other details of your video in your skill response. We’ll render the video on the device and allow customers to control the playback using both voice and touch interfaces.
• Enable Customers to View Smart Home Cameras. With Echo Show customers can say “Alexa, show the baby’s room” and have the feed from an Internet connected camera, like Arlo, display on Echo Show. To support this, we are introducing cameras as part of the Smart Home Skill API. Because the Smart Home Skill API taps into Amazon’s standardized Alexa language model, you won’t need to build the voice interaction model for your camera skill. Alexa will understand the customer’s speech, convert it to directive, and send that directive to your skill adapter. Your skill adapter will return the video feed URI from the requested camera. The URI is then passed to the Echo Show device so it can directly display the video.

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