Alexa Skills Kit in India
Teach Alexa a new skill and reach new customers
What Is an Alexa skill?
Alexa is Amazon’s voice service and the brain behind millions of devices including Amazon Echo. Alexa provides capabilities, or skills, that enable customers to create a more personalized experience. There are now thousands of skills available in India from brands like Saavn, Zomato, Times of India, and Goibibo as well as many other innovative designers and developers.
What Is the Alexa Skills Kit?
With the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), designers, developers, and brands can build engaging skills and reach new customers. ASK 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. With ASK, you can leverage Amazon’s knowledge and pioneering work in the field of voice design.
Alexa Student Influencers:
- Join the Alexa Student Influencer program if you have a craving to learn new technologies in AI and Voice Technologies, and share it with fellow student colleagues
Alexa Developer Communities
On-Demand Webinars:
- Namaste Alexa - Introduction to Alexa Skills Kit
- How to Scale Your Alexa Skill Using Amazon Web Services
- How to build a Multimodal skill for Echo Spot
- Skill Certification - Do's, Don'ts and Best Practices
- Build an Engaging Multi-modal Skill with Alexa Presentation Language
Announcements:
- Alexa Skill Blueprints - Learn to create and publish an Alexa Skill in minutes, no coding required.
- Alexa Kid Skills Now in India - Read the launch announcement blog
Support:
- Join our India Slack Channel to interact with fellow Alexa skill developers
- Visit our forums to get inspired, ask and answer questions, and join our Alexa developer community.
- Whatever your level or experience, get started quickly using one of our tutorials.
- Check out our advanced Alexa courses on Codecademy
- Earn cash rewards by publishing highly engaging skills to the India Alexa Skills Store
- Publish an India skill and earn Alexa swag.
- Apply and get USD 100 AWS credits
Get in Early
Natural user interfaces, such as those based on speech, represent the next major disruption in computing. With Alexa, you can take advantage of this new form of interaction.
Reach More Customers
Engage with your customers through voice on devices with Alexa including Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and all devices powered by the Alexa Voice Service.
Create Engaging Experiences
Delight your audience with a completely new way to interact with your service. Customers don't need to use their hands; all they have to do is ask Alexa.
Gain Expertise in Voice Design
The Alexa Skills Kit is a low-friction way to learn to build for voice. Create your first Alexa skill and add a valuable new skill to your developer toolkit. You can get a prototype up and running in just a few hours.
Scale in the Cloud
You can use your existing cloud-based service to get started. Or you can leverage AWS Lambda, which makes it easy to build a cloud-based service that responds quickly to a voice request.
Build for Free
ASK is free to use and AWS Lambda is free for the first one million calls per month. And Alexa skill developers can apply to receive AWS promotional credits to be put toward their Alexa skills.
ASK supports command-oriented skills as well as sophisticated multi-command dialogues and parameter passing. You can build the following types of skills with ASK.
Custom Skills
These skills can handle just about any type of request. You define the requests the skill can handle (intents) and the words your customers say to invoke those requests (utterances). Check out our step-by-step guide on building a custom skill. Learn more >>
Smart Home Skills
With these skills, customers can control cloud-enabled smart-home devices like lights and plugs. The Smart Home Skill API defines the requests the skill can handle (device directives) and the words customers say to invoke those requests (utterances). Learn more >>
Flash Briefing Skills
These skills provide original content for customers’ flash briefings. The Flash Briefing Skill API defines the words customers say to invoke the flash briefing or news request (utterances) and the format of the content so that Alexa can provide it to the customer. Learn more >>
Get Started
A successful Alexa skill starts with well-designed voice user interface (VUI). Engaging voice experiences are based on natural language and the fundamentals of human conversation. Check out the Amazon Alexa Voice Design Guide and watch Voice Design 101 to learn how to design for the ear, not for the eye.
If you are building a custom skill, create a framework to map user requests to intents your service can handle. And build out sample phrases so that your skill responds to user intents.
Not Sure Where to Start?
Looking for skill ideas? Consider designing a game skill. Twenty percent of our top skills are games like Jeopardy! and Animal Game.
With our tool and source code, you can graphically design interactive adventure games for Alexa. You can also design and build decision-tree skills and trivia skills with ASK. Get started >>
Alexa is based in the cloud so she’s always getting smarter and customers never have to download updates to your skill. You can set up your skills in AWS Lambda or another cloud-based hosting service. AWS Lambda is free for the first one million calls per month. You can also apply to receive AWS promotional credits. Check out our documentation on creating Lambda functions.
Follow our step-by-step guide to build a custom skill. When coding your skills, refer to our documentation on handling requests and on leveraging ASK samples. You can also build skills faster and with less complexity using the Alexa SDK for Node.js on GitHub.
Not Sure Where to Start?
You can start building quickly with our tutorials and code samples. For additional help, check out our webinars and developer forums.
Does your company build skills on behalf of customers?
Agencies are creating innovative Alexa skills so that brands can reach their customers via Amazon Alexa. If you think your company has the expertise to assist clients in creating skills, please contact us.
Once you’ve built your skill, get your skill added to the Alexa Skills Store for anyone to discover and use. After your skill is published, you can apply to receive special rewards. There are three steps to getting your skill certified and published.
1. Register your skill to add it to the developer portal.
2. Test your skill using the Test Simulator for Alexa Skills.
3. Submit your skill following our certification tips and checklist.
Make Your Skill Smarter over Time
Over time, monitor how people interact with your skill, then build on your learnings. Successful Alexa skills evolve over time to enhance the user experience. As you add capabilities to your skill, aim to increase utility.
Check out our training page for additional resources.
