We’re pleased to announce our collaboration with CareerFoundry on the company’s first specialized course for voice, Voice Design with Amazon Alexa.

When done right, adding audio files to your skills can enhance the voice experience. Follow these tips to check and set your skill’s audio volume.

We're excited to share the Amazon Alexa Voice Design Guide, a resource built on the experiences of the Amazon Alexa team, the skill builder community, and established industry practices.

With finals coming to an end and graduations happening for some, being a college student these past few weeks was no easy task. Nevertheless, students around the world brought their innovations to life by participating in our Hack-Your-World with Amazon Alexa contest. Check out the winners. 

Today we’re excited to share that this feature now includes usage information about your smart home skills and flash briefings.

Alexa and ecobee are at the forefront of voice user interface (VUI) design. We spoke with Tarun Tuli, director of embedded systems at ecobee, to learn how he and his team are approaching product development with voice control as the primary user interface.

We're excited to announce that Microsemi has released a 2-mic hands-free audio front end solution as part of the expanding Development Kits for AVS offering. The Microsemi AcuEdge™ dev kit enables you to design high-quality voice recognition interfaces while reducing engineering time and cost.

We are very happy to announce tunable lighting control, a feature in the Smart Home Skill API, is now available in the UK.

Simplicity is at the core of all Hive devices, which made integration with Alexa a natural next step, says Elvin Nagamootoo, Hive product lead. Using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), the Hive team built a smart home skill and a custom skill.

This is part five of our Makers Academy series for Ruby developers. Learn more about this free training on the Alexa Skills Kit and read part one, part two, part three, and part four.

We are excited to announce a new addition to the Smart Home Skill API, the ability to define appliance categories. By defining appliance categories, both you and your customers can easily identify the types of smart home devices with which they are interacting.

With the increased popularity of Alexa-compatible smart home devices, we’ve seen a surge in the number of smart home skill submissions. In this post, we’ll highlight key requirements, common issues we’re seeing, and helpful reference material for skills implemented using the Smart Home Skill API.

If you’re a Dish Network subscriber, or you’re thinking about becoming one, finding the perfect show or movie just got a lot easier with Alexa voice control. Dish Network subscribers can now voice control their TV experience with the Hopper DVR set-top box and the Echo Family of Devices.

Customers expect a delightful experience on Alexa, and it is our top priority to maintain that experience. With that in mind, today we are clarifying our policy on advertising in Alexa skills.

We invite you to join the students on their Alexa Prize journey and help them along the way. You can interact with their socialbots simply by saying “Alexa, let’s chat” on any device with Alexa.