Editor’s Note: Support for the Alexa Voice Service is now available in Australia and New Zealand.

Today, we’re excited to announce Amazon Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices are coming to Australia and New Zealand in early 2018. This will open up new opportunities for developers in Australia, New Zealand, and worldwide to build for Alexa and reach customers through voice-first experiences using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) and the Alexa Voice Service (AVS). Starting today, developers can build experiences for customers in Australia and New Zealand using the Alexa Skills Kit. Developers will be able to hit the ground running and get their skills ready when Alexa launches to customers early next year. Support for the Alexa Voice Service is coming soon.

Create New Skills for Alexa with the Alexa Skills Kit

The Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) is a collection of self-service APIs and tools that make it fast and easy for developers to create new voice-driven capabilities, or skills, for Alexa. Developers don’t need experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding—Alexa does all the work to hear, understand, and process the customer’s spoken request so developers don’t have to.

How to Build an Alexa Skill

It’s easy to start building voice experiences for Alexa. Explore our simple tutorials or watch our on-demand webinars to learn how to build a skill quickly. If you want to build a multi-language Alexa skill, read our technical documentation to learn how to create a skill in all language models, including English for US, India, UK, Canada, and Australia as well as German and Japanese. 

Update Your Existing Skill and Reach New Customers

If you’re already an Alexa developer and want to target new customers in Australia and New Zealand, you can enhance your existing skill by extending support for the new language model English (Australia) by following these simple steps.

Integrate Alexa into Your Devices with the Alexa Voice Service

The Alexa Voice Service (AVS) enables developers to integrate Alexa directly into their products, bringing the convenience of voice control to any connected device. Through AVS, hardware manufacturers will be able to build Alexa-enabled products and offer customers in Australia and New Zealand access to a growing number of Alexa features, smart home integrations, and skills.

AVS will provide developers with access to a suite of resources to quickly and easily build Alexa-enabled products, including APIs, hardware development kits, software development kits, and documentation. Device makers will be able to start building with AVS including an Alexa-enabled prototype for Raspberry Pi in an hour with the AVS Quick Start Guide. Support for the Alexa Voice Service is coming soon.

Start Building Skills Today

Need help as you get started? Connect with the Alexa community on our developer forums. We are excited to bring Amazon Alexa and Alexa-enabled devices to Australia and New Zealand soon to enable developers to reach and delight new customers. We can't wait to see what you build.