Watch: Simulate Skills in VS Code with Alexa Skills Toolkit

At Alexa Live, we launched Alexa Skills Toolkit 2.0 for VS Code to help streamline local development of skills with new features like local debugging, APL instant preview, and support for creating and deploying Alexa-hosted skills.

Today, we’re excited to expand on this set of features and introduce the skill simulator for the Alexa Skills Toolkit, giving you a powerful new tool to interact with your skill right from VS Code. With the skill simulator, you can now directly invoke your skill by sending text requests and reviewing the corresponding text responses, which include both the complete JSON request and response payloads. The simulator maintains the skill session with your skill just as a device would, so you can test the entire flow of your skill. The simulator also supports the rendering of Alexa Presentation Language (APL) responses, so you can preview your APL experiences across a variety of device shapes.

Additionally, the simulator allows you to save requests you've made in a session to a file and replay them. This allows you to replay those sessions at a later time or share them with others for testing.

The new simulator for Alexa Skills Toolkit for VS Code makes it easier than ever to build and test skills in your local environment. Learn more about the new simulator and Alexa Skills Toolkit by reading our Getting Started Guide or start building today by installing the extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace.

Watch the following video to see our very own German Viscuso walk you through how to set up and use the VS Code plugin: