It started with Sam Machin’s brainchild, Alexa in the Browser. Born late last year at a hackathon, the project served as an inspiration for Echosim.io – a new online community tool for developers that simulates the look and feel of an Amazon Echo. With 3D JavaScript animations and Alexa Voice Service (AVS) integration, Echosim.io gives users the ability to experience a realistic interaction with Alexa capabilities and skills.

Echosim.io lives in your browser, so anyone, anywhere can access it and test their Alexa skills. You no longer need an Alexa-enabled device to test your skills. Developers worldwide can use Echosim.io to experience Alexa. Its simplicity makes it easy for anyone to understand what an Echo is and what it does without having to explain Alexa’s unique UX.

Try Echosim.io for yourself. Simply visit the website and log in with your Amazon account. If you want to test your Alexa skill, be sure to log in with your developer account. Click and hold the microphone button and speak a command. For example, say “Alexa, what’s the weather today?” When you let go of the button, Echosim.io processes and responds to your voice command – give it a try.

The Alexa Voice Service integration puts the power of Alexa behind the 3D Javascript animations. AVS enables you to integrate Alexa's built-in voice capabilities into your connected products. Carve your own little corner in IoT with a speaker and mic, a microcomputer, and the self-service tools at developer.amazon.com. What would you do with Alexa and a Raspberry Pi?

Haven’t built a skill yet? Get started with our step-by-step tutorials and build your first skill in under an hour.

• Trivia Skill template - A great place to start for any first time Alexa skills developer. This tutorial steps you through the end-to-end process of building a solid trivia skill and submitting it for certification.
• Fact Skill template - Another easy tutorial for both developers and non-developers to build an Alexa skill similar to "fact of the day" or "flash cards". 
• How-to Skill template - This tutorial makes it easy to create a simple, direction-based skill for Alexa.

Last year, we introduced a Developer Preview of Alexa Voice Service (AVS) to hobbyists and device makers to help them integrate Alexa into their connected devices and apps, and then a few weeks back, we released an implementation of an Alexa enabled Raspberry Pi on GitHub. We couldn’t be happier with the response we received from the developer community.

Meet Triby – a new connected family-friendly kitchen device that magnetically sticks to the fridge and can play music, make calls, display messages, and is voice activated.

Built by Invoxia, Triby is one of the first ‘Alexa-enabled’ devices built with AVS, which means that you can do almost everything with Alexa on Triby that you can do with Alexa on Echo. 

You address Alexa through Triby using the “Alexa” wake word, just as you would on Echo. Simply say “Alexa, play Adele” and Triby can play Adele from Prime Music, “Alexa add milk to my list” and Triby will add it to your shopping list, or “Alexa, turn off the kitchen lights” and Triby becomes a way to access and control the smart home.

“Voice recognition capabilities transform the way we interact with music, content and services. Amazon made it available to the world with its first range of Alexa-enabled devices. Now with a diversified Alexa-enabled device offering, more people can enjoy the Alexa experience. We are excited to be at the forefront of many third party devices to integrate the Alexa Voice Service with Triby. It has great communication features, the ability to hear you from across the room while being portable and an always-on display. We can't wait to equip millions of kitchens with it!" says Sebastien de le Bastie, Invoxia’s Managing Director.

Learn More about Alexa on Triby.

If you are a device maker, service provider or application developer interested adding rich and intuitive experiences to your products – AVS is the right choice for you! Get Started

Ready to Get Started?

For more information on Alexa-enabled devices and getting started with Alexa, check out the following resources:

Have Questions? We are here to help! Visit us on the AVS Forum to discuss specific questions with one of our experts.

- @amit

We are very excited to introduce you to CoWatch - the world’s first ‘Alexa-enabled’ smartwatch built using the Alexa Voice Service API. Boasting a modern watch design, and a high-res touch screen, CoWatch is a companion smartwatch device with built in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and is the first wearable/smartwatch built on top of the Cronologics OS platform.

Great news—we've made this month’s t-shirt even more collectible. To recognize your accomplishment of publishing one of the first 1,000 Alexa skills, we’ve added a new badge to the April t-shirt. Simply come up with an idea for a skill, create your next (or first) Alexa skill, and publish it by April 30.

Not sure where to start? Our trivia and fact skill templates make it easy to create a simple skill for Alexa. Both templates and step-by-step guides leverage AWS Lambda and the Alexa Skills Kit, while providing the business logic, use cases, error handling and help functions for your skill.

Don't miss out. Build and publish your Alexa skill by April 30 to score your free Alexa dev t-shirt. Terms and conditions apply.

Hackster is a developer community dedicated to learning hardware and they’ve shared some pretty amazing projects using Alexa. Now, Hackster announced the Alexa Skill Contest to give developers like you a chance to connect your favorite hardware, IoT platform, and everyday life using Alexa.

To get started, check out the details of the contest. Here are a few other resources to help you get started quickly:

• Alexa Skills Kit
• Alexa Quick Start Guide
• Trivia Skill Template
• Fact Skill Template
• Samples on GitHub
• You don't need an Echo to participate – How to test
• Command Line Interface Automation
• Office hours and webinars

I’m curious to see what you’ll build. Keep in touch, @PaulCutsinger.

Today we are introducing the Smart Home Skill API, a new addition to the Alexa Skills Kit, which enables developers to add capabilities, called skills, to Alexa. Developers can now teach Alexa how to control their cloud-controlled lighting and thermostat devices so customers can simply say, “Alexa, turn on the kitchen lights” or “Alexa, turn up the heat.” You no longer need to build a voice interaction model to handle customer requests. This work is now done for you when you use the Smart Home Skill API. You create skills that connect your devices directly to our lighting and thermostat capabilities so that customers can control their lights, switches, smart plugs or thermostats—without lifting a finger.

We first introduced the Smart Home Skill API as a beta called the Alexa Lighting API in August 2015. As part of the beta program, we worked with companies including Nest, Ecobee, Sensi, Samsung SmartThings, and Wink in order to gather developer feedback, while extending Alexa’s smart home capabilities to work with their devices.

It’s easy and free for developers to use the Smart Home Skill API to connect Alexa to hubs and devices for both public and personal use. Get Started Now >

Creating Your Skill with the Smart Home Skill API

When you create a custom skill, you build the voice interaction model. When using the Smart Home Skill API, you tap into Amazon’s standardized language model so you skip the step of creating an interaction model. Alexa understands the user’s speech, converts it to a device directive and sends that directive to that skill adapter that you build in AWS Lambda.

Editor’s Note: Due to popular demand, we have extended the promotion period for the Envato Tuts+ offer for one month. Your skill will be eligible for this exciting promotion if you get it certified by May 31^st, 2016. See terms and conditions. 

Today, I’m excited to announce a limited-offer with Envato Tuts+ for the Alexa developer community. Envato Tuts+ is an e-learning platform that teaches creative and technical skills by providing free how-to tutorials, video courses and e-books to millions worldwide.  

To thank you for adding new skills to Alexa, we are offering three free months of Envato Tuts+ monthly subscription to the first 500 developers who get an Alexa skill certified and fill out this form by May 31, 2016.

How to Build an Alexa Skill with No Development Experience

If you’re just getting started with the Alexa Skills Kit, Envato Tuts+ has published a new step-by-step tutorial that will make it easy and fast to build a trivia quiz for Amazon Echo or any Alexa-enabled device. No experience with Alexa development tools required. This template can be used by non-programmers as well as beginners and intermediate developers. You just need to come up with a trivia idea, plug in your questions, and edit a few lines of script. It is a valuable way to quickly learn the end-to-end process of building and publishing an Alexa skill. 

Today, I’m excited to announce a collaboration between Bloc and Amazon Alexa. Bloc has been providing online coding bootcamps and mentor-led courses in design, web, and mobile development since 2011. With Bloc’s industry-vetted curriculum, students can gain knowledge of modern, practical programming skills and build portfolios of real projects to prepare them for their careers as developers and designers. Now Bloc students can learn about voice design and apply their knowledge by creating new Alexa skills.

Bloc’s new Alexa Project module is now integrated into the following curriculums:

We are excited to announce an important update to the Alexa Voice Service (AVS) that will enable you to enhance the user experience on your Alexa-enabled products.

Alexa Voice Service (AVS) is an intelligent and scalable cloud service that adds voice-enabled experiences to any connected product – all you need is a microphone and speaker. Users can simply talk to their Alexa-enabled products to play music, answer questions, get news/local information, control smart home products, and more. And with the free Amazon Alexa app, users can easily control and manage their products from anywhere!

Last year, we launched a developer preview of AVS to introduce you to the benefits of voice-powered experiences. With this update, we are making architectural improvements that include updated APIs and message structures, Amazon Alexa App (iOS and Android) support and the ability to send server-initiated messages.

With a community of more than 100,000 developers, makers, and entrepreneurs, Hackster.io enables users to showcase their portfolio, gather feedback on projects, and learn more about internet-connected hardware. Now, users can add Amazon Echo, Alexa Voice Service, and Alexa Skills Kit tags to their projects to be featured on the Amazon Alexa page on Hackster. We are inspired by the community members who have started to share what they built with Alexa from a voice-controlled drone to a dancing robot, and even a stormtrooper blaster. Hackster allows you to share full tutorials with a list of components, schematics, and code so anyone can replicate these projects at home.

I've always been a fan of open source communities. Hackster.io not only allows me to share my projects, but I also get feedback from other hackers with aligned interests. When I showcased Magic Mirror on Hackster I received private messages from members asking about the code and questions about setting up their own. I was happy to help and share knowledge.” - Arlo Carreon, creator of Magic Mirror on Hackster and Amazon employee

Build voice experiences, share your expertise, and connect with the Alexa community by joining the Hackster platform. Follow Alexa to stay tuned to new projects built by the community and powered by Alexa.

We are excited to see what you build next.

-Marion

Get Started Today

Check out these Alexa developer resources:

• Intro to Alexa Skills On Demand
• Voice Design 101 On Demand
• Alexa Skills Kit (ASK)
• Alexa Developer Forums

Special Offer We're offering free Alexa dev t-shirts for all developers who publish their skill and complete our form by March 31, 2016. Quantities are limited. See terms and conditions. Remember, you can get a skill up and running quickly using our Trivia Skill Template.

Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service, powers voice experiences on millions of devices, including Amazon Echo and Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick. Today, Amazon brings Alexa to more devices with its two newest additions: Echo Dot and Amazon Tap. Echo Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that enables you to add Alexa to any room. Amazon Tap is an Alexa-enabled portable speaker.

Amazon Echo Dot: Add Alexa to Any Room

Echo Dot is a hands-free, voice-controlled device that uses the same far-field voice recognition as Amazon Echo. Dot has a built-in speaker and also connects over Bluetooth or with the included audio cable to your own speaker. Echo Dot ($89.99) is available exclusively for Prime Members through Alexa Voice Shopping. To order your Echo Dot, use your Echo or Fire TV and just ask: “Alexa, order Echo Dot.”

Alexa—the brain behind Echo Dot—is built in the cloud, so it is always getting smarter. The more you use Dot, the more it adapts to your speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences. And because Echo Dot is always connected, updates are delivered automatically. Third-party skills from developers add even more capabilities like ordering a pizza from Domino's, requesting a ride from Uber, opening your garage with Garageio, and more. Enabling skills lets your Echo Dot do even more—simply discover and enable the skills you want to use in the Alexa App.

When creating an interaction model for your Alexa skill you can utilize several built-in slot types along with your own custom slots. Custom slots provide the ability to add custom values for items that are not covered by Amazon’s built-in slot types. By using built-in and custom slot you can drastically reduce number of sample utterances you need to provide, and increase the overall accuracy of Alexa’s speech recognition.

Based on your feedback, we are happy to announce the addition of extensible built-in slot types starting with AMAZON.US_CITY, AMAZON.US_FIRST_NAME and AMAZON.US_STATE.

Extending a built-in slot type appends the values you provide to the built-in values defined by Amazon. For example, AMAZON.US_CITY automatically recognizes US cities with a population over 100,000. If you need to collect additional cities, such as your hometown, you could add them to the list by extending the type. The slot would then recognize both the original set of values as well as the custom ones you added.

In order to extend a slot type, edit to your skill and click on the Interaction Model tab. Next, scroll down the Interaction Model page and click on Add Slot Type.

Today we announced that Amazon is teaming up with Big Nerd Ranch to deliver immersive, free training for the Alexa Skills Kit.

Big Nerd Ranch, known globally for its highly effective immersive application development bootcamps and app development services, is working with Amazon to develop training courses for the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). 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. Using ASK, you can teach new skills to Alexa in just a few hours. No prior experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding is required. All of the code runs in the cloud — nothing is installed on any user device.

This new training will be available to you later this month, at no cost, and we’ll continue to roll out new modules over the coming months. The training will show you how to build Alexa skills from start to finish, beginning with development environment setup, and concluding with the Amazon certification and more complex skill interactions like account linking. Best practices for voice user interfaces will also be taught, along with UI design, database interaction, testing and more.

You can check out the full announcement here.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

Over the past several weeks I have been hosting weekly Alexa webinars offering an introduction to building skills, voice design guidance as well as hands on demos with the latest Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) features. Based on your feedback, some of the most exciting parts of these webinars have been the open dialog we have had together. The webinars have become a place to get your questions answered directly and instantly. With that in mind I am happy to announce new weekly office hours in addition to the weekly webinars.

Office hours, which I had previously called Alexa Dev Chats, will be a place for you talk directly with myself and the Amazon Alexa team every Tuesday at 1pm PST/4pm EST. During these office hours, you will be able to get answers to any technical questions you have, discuss your skill use case, learn voice design best practices and see live code demos to help you troubleshoot. Our hope is to enable you to get help with quick questions, build the right voice design for your use case, get your skill certified more quickly, and learn how to use AWS services like AWS Lambda for your skill. 

We’ll rotate different roles through the office hours so that you can learn about voice design from our VUI experts, new ASK features from our engineering team, as well as skill submission tips from our certification team.

Here are the topics for the next four weeks:

• February 16^th, General FAQ
• February 23^rd, Certification
• March 1^st, General FAQ
• March 8^th, Voice Design

Sign up now. You can sign up for your preferred date or topic here. If you would like to have a chat on a topic not currently listed, please let me know.

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)

It's been a big week for our Alexa developer community. Developers have added over 200 skills to the Alexa platform. Amazon Echo and Fire TV customers can now request a car service with Uber or order a pizza from Domino's — just in time for the Super Bowl. Alexa will also join Alec Baldwin for the #BaldwinBowl, starring in Amazon's first-ever Super Bowl commercial. Watch the videos to see how Alexa is helping Alec plan an epic party.

Alexa, Ask Uber to Get Me a Car

Alexa can now call you a car. Whether you're off to the airport or a big night out, get a reliable ride in minutes. Choose among Uber's various ride options, from low-cost to premium. You can check it out on The Verge or learn more details on the API integration on the Uber developer blog here.

To get started, set your Echo's location under "Settings" in your Alexa App, then enable the Uber skill and link your Uber account. If you don't have an account, you'll be prompted to create one. Once set up, just ask:

Spotify

We also announced this week that Spotify subscribers in the U.S. can now listen to their music on Amazon Echo—just ask Alexa to play any playlist, artist, genre and more from Spotify’s catalog. And because Echo also supports Spotify Connect, customers can easily transfer and control their listening experience from the Spotify app to Echo—just select Echo from the list of available devices within the Spotify app. Then, just ask: