Alexa Skills Kit Expands to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates

Today, we are excited to announce that developers can start building voice experiences, called “skills” for customers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) in Gulf Arabic (Khaleeji). Skills that developers create now, and are certified for publication, will be available for customers when Alexa launches in KSA and the UAE later this year. Commercial hardware manufacturers who want to develop Alexa Built-in products for customers in KSA or the UAE can request early access to the invite-only Alexa Voice Service (AVS) developer preview. Along with Echo devices, companies including Samsung and LG will bring Alexa Built-in devices while Philips Hue, Tuya, and Xiaomi will bring Works with Alexa devices to KSA and the UAE. Developers will also be able to create skills for those countries in English.

ASK is a collection of self-service APIs and tools that make it fast and easy for developers to create new voice-driven capabilities, or skills, for Alexa. Developers don’t need experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding to build a skill—Alexa does all the work to hear, understand, and process the customer’s spoken request so developers do not have to.

It is easy to start building voice experiences for Alexa. Try our basic fact skill sample, read our guide on how to design a voice user interface, or watch our on-demand webinars to learn how to build a skill quickly.

If you want to build a multi-language Alexa Skill, read our technical documentation to learn how to create a skill in all language models, including English for the US, India, the UK, Canada, and Australia as well as Hindi, German, Japanese, French for France and Canada, Italian, Spanish for the US, Spain and Mexico, Portuguese for Brazil, and now Arabic for KSA and UAE.

If you are an Alexa developer and want to engage new customers in KSA and/or the UAE, you can enhance your existing skill by extending support for Arabic by following these simple steps.

AVS enables device makers to integrate Alexa directly into their products to bring the convenience of voice interaction to any connected device. AVS provides a suite of resources, including APIs, hardware development kits, software development kits, and documentation. Later this year, device makers will be able to leverage these resources to launch products with Alexa Built-in in KSA and the UAE with access to the Arabic-language model and regional services like Alexa Skills.