Today we’re happy to share that developers have published over 10,000 skills, making Alexa even better for customers. We’ve been blown away by the innovation and activity in the Alexa developer community. To put it in perspective, we’ve seen a 3x increase in the number of skills available since September 2016 alone. We’ve come a long way in the short time that the Alexa Skills Kit has been available for developers, and we’ve seen a wide range of unique skills that allow customers to do everything from reorder their favorite morning coffee, stay mindful through meditation, control smart home lighting or check their bank account balance.

In November we unveiled a new way for customers to discover Alexa skills and explore the breadth of the Alexa skills catalog. With Alexa skills on Amazon.com, customers can enable skills directly through the website and leave reviews, just like other items on Amazon. Many skills have hundreds of reviews and are rated 4-star or higher by customers. We’ve also added ways for customers to enable and find popular skills, just using their voice.

To celebrate this 10k milestone of skill selection, here are a few Alexa skill highlights:

• Beat the Intro has the honor of being the 10,000th skill published. It’s a music game by Musicplode Media that tests your knowledge and love of music.
• Customers love to play voice-based games and some of the highest customer-rated skills continue to be interactive games. The Magic Door and Jeopardy! are two customer favorites. One of our recent API mashup contest winners also created a video game companion skill that turned Alexa into a Star Trek-like space ship interface.
• The top 5 categories of skills, in descending order are: News, Gaming, Education/Reference, Lifestyle and Novelty/Humor.
• There are now tens of thousands of developers building skills for Alexa.

We want to thank the developer community for their tireless efforts and innovation across all skill categories. We knew when we created Alexa that the possibilities would be endless. The Alexa Skills Kit enables anyone, anywhere, using almost any programming language to see their ideas come to life and create new voice experiences for all of us to enjoy every day.

For more information about the Alexa Skills Kit, check out the following:

Alexa Skills Kit Developer Portal
Alexa Skills Kit Developer Forums
Alexa Dev Chat Podcast
Alexa Skills on Amazon.com

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)