Alexa Skills Playbook
With so many other skills in the Amazon Skills Store, it’s important to be direct, focused, and clear. We recommend considering these proven strategies to improve your skill’s presence.
The keywords and description text are very important. They help customers understand what the skill does, even before invoking it for the first time. They also help customers to find your skill, because Amazon uses these keywords to populate in search.
- Optimize both your skill and invocation names: Give your skill a clear and intuitive name that speaks to its purpose and value.
- Add an eye-catching skill icon: Consider memorable images that engage, educate, or excite customers.
- Write a clear, value-rich description: Keep it short and simple. Lead with the most important information and explain your skill's value.
- Show rather than tell customers: Show what your skill can do with images, video, or both. Support Echo Show dimensions so you can demonstrate your APL skills when applicable.
One great example is Matchbox.io’s Question of the Day. See how the skill makers followed the aforementioned suggestions to create a simple, straightforward description page:
Now that you have an engaging skill with a beautiful and memorable Amazon Skills Store presence, you can start telling people about your skill. There are a few ways you can market it to attract new customers.
Routines are shortcuts for Alexa. They save time by grouping together several actions so a user doesn’t have to ask for each individually. Customers can activate Routines in many ways — via voice, time of day, with smart home devices, when turning off an alarm, and more.
Routines are made for sharing and they draw attention to your skill. You can share your Routines on your website, newsletters, or social media. For inspiration, you can check out the trending Shared Routines.
Now, developers can deep link Custom Tasks to surface core functionalities of their skill, as actions, in Routines. 'Custom Tasks in Routines’ enables customers to select a specific action, supported by the skill, while setting up their Routines. Then, the skill performs that specific action as part of Routine execution, rather than a simple launch. You can make your Custom Tasks compatible with Routines by adding incremental fields in the task definition file. This documentation describes the necessary steps.
With the extension of Custom Tasks to Routines, developers are now empowered to drive greater traffic and visibility for their skill, increasing the overall benefits of creating Custom Tasks. Here is an example of Volley’s Bedtime Stories
Example of setting up a custom routine
Customers are going to benefit from your skill only if it’s easy to find and use. Even if you build the most wonderful experience, add the right keywords and description, it’s not always easy to discover new experiences with voice alone, and then, to remember invocation names.
Quick Links for Alexa is one remedy to this challenge, enabling you to place a link in your mobile app, website, or online ad for customers to click and launch your skill. This makes it easy for customers to access your skill and easy for you to track conversion from online ads. Such companies as CNBC, Domino’s, Matchbox, and ViacomCBS are already using Quick Links for Alexa.
You can find out more in Quick Links for Alexa documentation and check out our sample code here. Don’t hesitate to ask questions in our ASK Developer forum here.
Voice is helpful for many on-the-go experiences, like playing music or getting information. Yet sometimes, customers want more controls or additional information on their mobile screens, through your app or website.
Alexa for Apps lets you combine your Alexa skill with your iOS and Android mobile apps to give customers the best of both worlds. They get natural and hands-free interaction via voice, but they are also steered to an app to go deeper when needed.
Use the Alexa for Apps API in your skill to let customers take care of everyday tasks in their apps, hands-free. For example, you can enable mobile customers to use their voices to open search results, view additional information, or access other app functionality. The TikTok skill enables users to record their videos hands-free, saving them time and sparking creativity:
Starting in the fall 2021, you can use Alexa for Apps to connect voice and apps together from any Alexa-enabled device, including hundreds of millions of home devices. You can learn more in our Alexa for Apps blogpost and you can apply to get access to the preview.
Customers around the world enjoy using Alexa skills. It’s only natural to try to reach customers in as many countries as possible, but building and, more importantly, updating a world-spanning skill can be tedious. In order to reach a global audience, skill builders have to copy or clone content to all locales, one by one.
Today, we are announcing a new program that enables you to build and update your preferred locale. Your changes will be propagated to additional locales of the same language, automatically.
By launching Sync Locale, ASK simplifies building for a language, and empowers skill builders to delight more customers and generate more traffic globally with minimal effort.
“Sync Locale is extremely simple to configure. It speeds up the development process when working on the different En- locales. Manually changing all the different versions of the model was rather tedious and Sync Locale takes care of that well.”
- Vittorio Molaschi, co-founder of VocaLime
“We want to specify that this feature is really time-saving!”
- Davide Marchesan, head of development at NAVOO
Learn more about Sync Locale from our announcement.
Before 2019, Alexa developers didn’t have a way to monetize their popular and engaging skills. Now, you can use In-Skill Purchasing to build a business by creating and selling premium digital content (game expansion packs, extra content or features, subscriptions, and other) through your skill.
Amazon enables the purchase and transaction experience, so you can focus on creating delightful premium experiences for customers.
There is also a new way for developers to monetize digital products and content for Alexa customers. With Paid Skills, customers pay upfront to access the core functionality of a skill, compared to In-Skill Purchases that are offered as optional premium purchases within a free skill.
Developers will now be able to create, manage, and publish Paid Skills to Alexa devices over voice and to Amazon.com.
Learn more about In-Skill Purchases and Paid Skills.
