These trainings, developed by Amazon, are designed to build capabilities for all Alexa skill builders, from novice to expert level. You will apply conceptual knowledge and receive real-time feedback in a state-of-the-art e-learning experience that will enable you to build interactive and engaging experiences with Alexa.
This learning path will teach you how to build multimodal interactions to make your voice-only skill more interactive and easier to use. You will learn fundamentals such as the various elements of a multimodal skill, the request and response lifecycle, and Alexa Presentation Language (APL), the language used to create visuals for devices with screens. After receiving an introduction to foundational knowledge, you will embark on a practical hands-on journey where you can practice what you learn within our state-of-the-art e-learning solution. You will write code and receive real-time feedback to help you progressively advance your skills.
There are many types of Alexa-enabled devices beyond speakers — Alexa is enabled across devices that have multiple modalities for customers to interact with, including devices with screens from Amazon, like the FireTV and Echo Show, and devices from other manufacturers, such as some LG and Samsung TVs. When customers use Alexa, they expect the full range of capabilities from their device, with or without a screen.
Skills with visual experiences are on average three times more likely to be engaging to the customer. Hence, Amazon created Alexa Presentation Language (APL) so you can design custom experiences that combine voice, audio, and visual elements in a single customer interface. This framework is adaptable so one design can scale to multiple device types while keeping the visual and voice elements synchronized.
In this course, you will learn the fundamental concepts of Alexa Presentation Language (APL) that will help you to build Alexa skills for devices with screens.
APL adds a new dimension to engage users by displaying complementary visuals with your voice responses. When developing a multimodal skill, you’ll need to think about the visual display in addition to voice to enable user interaction with the skill in multiple ways. In the last course, you learned about APL concepts. Knowledge about how users interact with APL and the APL lifecycle will help you make the right design choices when creating a multimodal skill.
In this course, you will create the welcome screen for a “Guess the Number” game. Tasks include displaying a text using APL (welcome screen), testing whether the user’s device supports APL, binding data displayed in a visual (display information from JSON instead of from a literal string), and displaying user input on screen.
Different types of devices have viewports that range in size from small to extra large. If your skill is able to adapt to different display types, then the on-screen content you provide in your skill will render as designed across differently sized Alexa-enabled device screens.
In the previous courses, you learned how to create a basic multimodal skill. Ensuring your skill renders properly in different display types can be a daunting task if you want to customize displayed content. APL provides features and tools to address this challenge. APL's responsive components and templates allow you to create an experience that renders properly across all devices, meaning less work for you.
In this course, you will learn how to make your visual experience responsive to different display types and specifications using APL features.
Most devices that support Alexa display also support touch or pointer input. To create a holistic experience for the user, your skill should be able to respond to touch or pointer input.
In the last course, you learned how to make your skill responsive to different display types and specifications. Touch, or pointing and selecting, is an intuitive form of user interaction in displays that support touch or pointer inputs. To ensure the user is able to interact with your skill intuitively, you will need to enable your skill to work with touch inputs.
In this course, you will work to create an APL document that will allow the user to click on up/down buttons to select a number they think is the correct guess. Once this is done, the user can click the submit button to send the guess to the skill’s backend for validation.
Alexa Presentation Language (APL) best practices help streamline your APL skill development process and improve the quality of the interactive voice and visual experiences in your Alexa skills.
In this course, you will learn to create your own APL layouts and styles. We highlight advanced topics and knowledge about how to plan and build sophisticated APL experiences for Alexa skills. We've incorporated the feedback received from the developer community in our selection of the content for this course (which by no means represent an exhaustive list of advanced topics and best practices). We appreciate and regularly review the feedback you submit.
*By clicking on "Enroll now" or “Launch course”, you will leave the Amazon Developer Portal and you will be taken to our partner portal alexa.sana.ai. Information collected by or on behalf of Amazon about your use of alexa.sana.ai will be subject to the applicable Amazon Privacy Notice.
Build an engaging Alexa skill
By Amazon Alexa
Start building quickly with our beginner tutorial. You'll get hands-on, step-by-step guidance to help you create your first Alexa skill.
How to design for In-Skill Purchasing
By Amazon Alexa
Learn our best practices for monetizing your skill and selling premium content.
Build multi-turn skills with Alexa Conversations
By Amazon Alexa
Learn how to build a skill using machine learning with Alexa Conversations.
Build a multi-turn Alexa Conversations skill with ACDL
By Amazon Alexa
Learn to build multi-turn skills using Alexa Conversations Description Language (ACDL). This workshop is for anyone with beginner-level coding experience.
Learn to build specific types of Alexa skills with these code samples to get you started.*
*If you click on the link to a third party site below, you will leave the Amazon Developer Portal and be re-directed to a third party website.
Alexa Presentation Language (APL) Client Library
The APL Client Library provides communication between APLViewhostWeb and apl-core-library. Its job is making sure that APL documents are correctly rendered and getting updated based on a user’s interaction.
Quiz Game Skill
Movie Quote Quiz was built to showcase the abilities of APL. A user can open up the skill, select a movie from a list, and then hear partial quotes from the selected movie. Then, they have to complete the quote.
Fact Skill
Adding premium content to your skill is a way for you to monetize your skill. This sample skill has taken the basic fact skill and has added new categories as premium content.
