Alexa Utterance Guidelines

Amazon, Alexa, and all related marks are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.

What are Alexa Utterances?

Alexa utterances are the vocal questions and commands that trigger corresponding Alexa actions and responses. For example, “Alexa, what’s the weather?” is an utterance used to get the weather forecast. All utterances featured on product packaging, retail displays, marketing materials, TV, film, media, or live entertainment must adhere to these guidelines.

Construction

The Alexa utterance should always be depicted with the following key elements:

  • Curly “smart” opening and closing quotation marks “…”
  • The wake word “Alexa” followed by a comma
  • The appropriate punctuation for the utterance, “.” or “?”
  • Sentence case
  • When appropriate, utterance should be italicized (Georgia Italic and Times New Roman Italic is preferred).

Alexa utterance construction graphic

Speech Bubble Guidelines

What is the speech bubble?

The speech bubble is an illustrative expression of an utterance. It is a quick and visual way to give customers examples of what they can ask Alexa. Utterances are not required to appear in a speech bubble and can be typeset. Select the approach that fits best for your communication materials.

All product packaging, retail displays, marketing materials, TV, film, media, or live entertainment featuring Echo and/or Alexa interactions must use actual Alexa utterances. Approved Alexa utterances can be found on the All Things Alexa page.

Speech bubble graphic

Flag

The speech bubble can have a flag in one of six positions. Always face the flag toward the speaker, even if the speaker is off-frame.

Typeface

Each utterance begins and ends with curly “smart” quotes and uses sentence case. Line spacing is determined by the typeface size. If the typeface is 34 px then line spacing for a two-line utterance would be 41 px (round to whole numbers).

Height and Width

The height and width of the speech bubble are determined by the typeface size. If the type face is 34 px then a 34 px margin around the utterance determines the width and height.

Color

The speech bubble is rendered in white with a 50% Squid Ink stroke with a weight approximately 20% of the point size of the type contained within. The typography is rendered in Squid Ink.

Call and Response

White speech bubbles are used to represent the customer and blue bubbles are used to represent Alexa.

Call and Response

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Co-Branded Speech Bubble for Alexa Skills

The co-branded speech bubble is a tool to market Alexa skills. It is based on the standard speech bubble, but incorporates a partner’s skill icon. The general guidelines are the same as for the standard utterance bubble.

co-branded speech bubble
v2 cobranded speech bubble