What is the Alexa Skills Kit?

Alexa, the voice service that powers Amazon Echo, provides capabilities, or skills, that enable customers to interact with devices in a more intuitive way using voice. Examples of skills include the ability to play music, answer general questions, set an alarm or timer, and more. Now Alexa Skills Kit is available in the UK.

The Alexa Skills Kit is a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation and code samples that make it fast and easy for you to add skills to Alexa. Developers and hardware makers around the world can create Alexa skills for UK customers with the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) today or integrate Alexa into their hardware with the Alexa Voice Service. Popular European brands have already built Alexa skills, including JustEat,The Guardian, Jamie Oliver, Hive, Netatmo, and National Rail. There are over 3,000 skills for Alexa in the US, and now developers can extend their experiences to more customers in Europe.

Get started with our step-by-step checklist

What's new with Alexa Skills Kit?

The new Device Address API enables skills to request and access the configured address in the customer’s device settings. This means you can build skills with the context to understand the customers who use the skill, then use the data to customize the voice experience. Check out our blog post to learn more.

We now have a new metrics dashboard available in the developer portal to give you better insight into your skill metrics. Find out more in our blog post

We've also added the Flash Briefing Skill API to our Alexa Skills Kit for UK developers. Check out our blog to find out more and sign up below for our webinar where you can learn how to build a Flash Briefing skill.

There are lots of learning opportunities available, check out our links below, or join one of our regular live webinars.

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