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Alexa Skills Kit    >    Get Deeper    >    Custom Skills

Custom Skills

Create your own voice experience and deliver nearly any use case. You can publish skills in more than 20 categories including including games, productivity, local experiences, and more.

Custom Skills

How Custom Skills Work

When you build a custom skill, you define your own interaction model, or voice use interface, rather than relying on one provided by Alexa. Your custom interaction model specifies how customers' spoken input maps to the requests, or intents, that your skill can handle. When a customer speaks to your skill, Alexa uses your interaction model to determine the underlying customer intent, and sends it to your skill application logic.

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Key Features of Custom Interaction Models

Intents

Intents represent the customer requests that your skill can handle. You define the intents for the unique functions that your skill provides, and can also take advantage of built-in intents for common actions such as stopping, canceling, and asking for help.

Slots

Intents can optionally have arguments, or variables, called slots. You provide a name and a slot type for each slot in your interaction model. The slot type contains a list of representative values for the slot in order to improve recognition accuracy. You can use a built-in slot type for commonly used arguments such as dates and numbers, or define your own.

Sample Utterances

Sample utterances are spoken phrases that customers will use with your skill. When you design your interaction model, you specify the phrases customers will use throughout your skill experience and how Alexa should map these to your skill intents.

Dialog Management

Alexa can take on the back-and-forth of a dialog, gathering information and letting your customer interact conversationally. You write less code and they have a more natural-feeling experience.

ASK SDKs

Use the Alexa Skills Kit SDKs for Node.js, Python, and Java to reduce complexity in how you receive and respond to requests from Alexa. 

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Understand How to Build Custom Skills

Get an overview of the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and how you can use it to build custom skills.

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Explore Example Custom Skill Categories

You can use the custom skill type to deliver nearly any use case. 

Categories Include

View a full list of skill categories in the Alexa Skills Store. 

Go to Alexa Skills Store

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Learn about Skill Categories with Special Requirements or Tools

Game Skills

Pioneers of voice games are imagining a whole new way to engage players, feeding their curiosity with new ways to play—including interactive adventures, family-friendly games, and quiz games.

Healthcare Skills

The Alexa Skills Kit now enables select Covered Entities and their Business Associates, subject to the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), to build Alexa skills that transmit and receive protected health information as part of an invite-only program.

Kid Skills

Build fun and educational voice experiences for kids.

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Latest Feature Updates for Custom Skills

                

Date Name Summary Locale Availability Links Release Type
3/1/2021 Alexa Conversations (GA)
Create Alexa skills that feel more natural with fewer lines of code (General Availability)
US

Alexa Blog

Documentation

GA

7/22/2020

Alexa Conversations (beta)

Create Alexa skills that feel more natural with fewer lines of code (beta)

US

Alexa Blog

Documentation

 

Beta

7/22/2020

Quick Links for Alexa

Customers can launch your skills by clicking a link from your mobile app, website, or online ads

US, es-US

Alexa Blog

Documentation

Beta

7/22/2020

Alexa for Apps

You can now enable customers to quickly get to key content and functionality in your app, just by asking Alexa.

All

Alexa Blog

Documentation

Preview Form

Preview

7/22/2020

Customer Behavior Analytics

You can now understand how customers behave in your skill with Customer Behavior analytics

US

Alexa Blog

Documentation

Beta

7/22/2020

Multi-Value Slots (MVS)

Receive multiple slot values and respond to more complex utterances

All English language locales

Alexa Blog

Documentation

Beta

Get Started with Custom Skills

Ready to build? Follow our beginner tutorial for custom skills, then start building your skill with the Alexa Skills Kit..