Today we launched a new page on the Alexa portal designed to help organizations, from small businesses to global brands, connect with the agencies, tools and analytics providers that specialize in creating and managing Alexa voice experiences. We’ve had the privilege of working with many experienced companies creating innovative skills for recognizable brands. We’ve also heard from companies that are interested in building skills, but need more expertise in designing a voice user interface or don’t have the internal resources to do the work themselves. [Read More]

In November 2016 we collaborated with Capital One to accelerate the pace of voice technology innovation with a $10,000 Alexa skill contest for AWS re:Invent attendees. In the contest we challenged attendees to build innovative voice experiences using the Alexa Skills Kit. Individuals or teams of up to four competed to create a unique skill that a customer could use every day. [Read More]

Being a college student is a juggling act. That’s why the inaugural Hack-the-Dorm with Amazon Alexa contest, in collaboration with MindSumo, challenged students to build a new voice controlled Alexa skill to help make life easier and better on campus. A big thank you to the teams of students who submitted their creative and useful skills for the dorm using the Alexa Skills Kit.

The winners are ... 

Just Eat has grown a lot since its humble beginnings in a Danish basement in 2001. Now headquartered in London, Just Eat is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is the world’s leading marketplace for online food ordering and delivery. Its goal, simply put, is to revolutionize the way people find, order and enjoy food.

Just Eat is making good on that mission. Today, it connects more than 62,000 restaurants across 100 cuisines in 15 countries, with an audience of over 15 million people.

Craig Pugsley is a principal designer in Just Eat’s Product Research team. He says the UK has a long tradition of delivery and takeout meals. Just Eat’s apps let diners explore exciting new cuisines at nearby restaurants. With menus for over 27,000 restaurants in the UK alone, it’s easy to find a new favorite flavor anytime.

Research quickly showed Pugsley’s team that diners tend to order their favorites again and again. So when Amazon brought Echo and Alexa to the UK, Just Eat saw a new opportunity. The Just Eat Alexa skill would make reordering a tasty new fave even easier, with just a few words:

“Alexa, tell Just Eat to re-order Dim sum.”

No phone calls. No fumbling for a smartphone app. And no digging out credit card details. Just quick delivery of your favorite comfort food.

Today’s post comes from J. Michael Palermo IV, Sr. Evangelist at Amazon Alexa. You will learn why you should use a custom slot instead of the soon to be deprecated AMAZON.LITERAL.

We’ve been listening to your feedback for Alexa feature requests and questions. As such, this post provides details around the deprecation of literal slots. By the time you finish reading this post, you will see it doesn’t matter that the LITERAL slot type is going away because it already has a better replacement: custom slot types.

Before we get into the details, it’s clear that the community needs more time to experiment with custom slot types and to make the transition. So, we’re moving the LITERAL deprecation date for US skills to Feb 6^th 2017. From the beginning, custom slot types (and not LITERAL) have been the solution in the UK or Germany.

Slots let you to build interaction models and pass phrases from the user to your skill. Amazon provides a set of built-in slot types that cover common things like numbers, names, and dates. Custom slot types go beyond these to enable support for the scenarios that you’ve chosen to build. They are a superset of the LITERAL slot type that we’re deprecating.

This post will describe how to support three common LITERAL scenarios we’ve seen.

Scenario 1: I want to collect an arbitrary word or phrase from what the user said.

Imagine a situation where you want to gather information from users that you don’t know when you build your interaction model. Examples include things like lists of wines, items in a game, names of cities, nicknames, etc. It’s clear that you could build a custom slot with all the values that you do know but how do you handle the values that you don’t or can’t know?

First, be sure to check the list of built-in slot types. You may find something that we’ve already built for you like first names, city names, last names, dates, numbers, and many more.

When you create a custom slot type, a key concept to understand is that this is training data for Alexa’s NLP (natural language processing). The values you provide are NOT a strict enum or array that limit what the user can say. This has two implications 1) words and phrases not in your slot values will be passed to you, 2) your code needs to perform any validation you require if what’s said is unknown.

Let’s look at an example of how to build support for something like nicknames. The custom slot type is named NICKNAMES. The custom slot values are shown here: 

Figure 1 : Custom slot for NICKNAMES

The intent schema uses NICKNAMES instead of AMAZON.LITERAL.

Meet the Sugr Cube, a portable minimalist Wi-Fi speaker system now with Amazon Alexa.

With a growing number of smart products found in the home today, form factor design has become just as important as the technology found under the hood. Customers want smart home products that make their lives easier, but not at the expense of personal taste and design aesthetic. That’s where Sugr, a global innovator in high-definition Wi-Fi audio systems, comes in.

Customers can stream music from Spotify with Spotify Connect technology, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and more just by tapping and asking. The speaker also responds to unique gestures or movements—customers can play music with simple touch commands, with rocking motions, or with the companion mobile application.

Earlier in the summer, Ashwin Karuhatty reached out to a group of connected home integration professionals in the Custom Electronics Design and Installation Association (CEDIA). Karuhatty, part of Amazon’s Smart Home business development team, wanted to encourage integrators to develop new Alexa skills for the connected home. CEDIA’s annual conference was an ideal place to start.[Read More]

With Amazon Alexa, developers are creating novel and delightful voice experiences for customers. University students are rethinking the way we live. Meet Adam Betemedhin, an Electrical Engineering major, and Kevin Duong-Tran, a Computer Science major, from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Adam and Kevin, along with roughly 20 other students from multi-disciplinary backgrounds at UNLV, are participating in the 2017 Solar Decathlon, a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy that will culminate in October of this year. [Read More]

We just wrapped up an exciting week at the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). You may have read some of the buzz around voice and Alexa at CES this year. Companies and developers expanded Alexa skills and integrations with dozens of announcements and demonstrations at CES. Developers like you are helping to build the future of a voice-driven world . Thanks to your work, Alexa now has over 7,000 skills and a growing number of integrations on third-party devices. [Read More]

The Alexa Skills Kit provides the ability to display visual information, both text and images, via skill cards. These cards are a useful way to provide your users with additional information from your Alexa skill that may be too verbose or too difficult to include in the voice user interface. Skill cards can be displayed in many form factors across different types of devices. This includes the Alexa app via iOS and Android devices, the Alexa app via a web browser, on Fire Tablet, and on the big screen while interacting with skills on Fire TV.[Read More]

In October of last year we worked with Hackster.io to launch the Amazon Alexa API Mashup Contest challenging developers to connect their favorite public APIs to Alexa. Developers submitted 163 projects that connected Alexa to the APIs of companies like Slack, Medium, Yelp, and many others.

Special thanks to everyone who competed in this contest. We were impressed by the creativity, quality, and high number of entries. We encourage you to browse through the projects. Each one comes with source code and documentation that might be a helpful reference when you code your next Alexa skill.

Today at CES, Nucleus demonstrated new Display Cards for Alexa that offer complementary visual content alongside voice responses from the Alexa Voice Service.

For screen-based devices like the Amazon Fire TV with Alexa, Display Cards for Alexa offer the ability to render a “Now Playing” interface for music and books, as well as graphical information for weather, to-do and shopping lists, calendar updates, and Alexa skills when a user engages with Alexa.

Volkswagen unveiled its plans to integrate with Amazon Alexa at CES yesterday during a moderated press event and booth tour.

The company will collaborate with Amazon to bring Alexa into the car through a voice integration on the head unit. In addition to the in-car Alexa integration, Volkswagen also announced a new Alexa skill that will help car owners get information about their vehicle from inside the home using an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or any Alexa device.

Huawei announced today at CES that its Mate 9 model will be available in the United States starting on January 6, 2017. Building on the company’s history of innovation, the Mate 9 will be the first introduced smartphone with an app featuring Amazon Alexa.

The pre-installed application will provide users with a natural, convenient way to set alarms, build to-do lists, get weather and traffic reports, and more—all they have to do is ask. For existing Mate 9 owners, the app will be available through an over-the-air update.

The Ford Motor Company announced a two-phased approach to integrating Amazon Alexa into its 2017 line of vehicles.

The first gives electric Ford vehicle owners the ability to connect to their cars from the comfort of their homes through Alexa devices such as the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, and Amazon Tap. The second phase, which starts this spring, enables Ford drivers with SYNC 3 AppLink to ask Alexa to search and transfer destinations to navigation, resume audiobooks, request news, add items to Amazon shopping list, and more—all from their car.