Alexa Skills Kit > Get Deeper > Development Tools & Skill Management APIs
Pick the right tool for your development and skill management process. Then, test your skill for both functionality and interaction model conflicts. Once you're finished testing, you can submit your skill for certification to be published in the Alexa Skills Store.
Developer Console
Use the ASK developer console in your browser to create, manage, test, and publish skills. You can also access analytics showing customer usage. This is ideal for developers who want to have a visual representation of their voice user interface.
Command Line Interface (CLI)
The ASK Command Line Interface (CLI) is a tool that you can use to manage your Alexa skills and related resources, such as interaction models and account linking details, from the command line. This is ideal for advanced programmers who want to automate parts of their skill-building process or for teams looking to collaborate with version control.
Toolkit for Visual Studio Code
Use our extension for Visual Studio Code to develop and deploy your skills locally in an integrated development environment (IDE). This is ideal for offline development.
Skill Management API (SMAPI)
The Alexa Skill Management API (SMAPI) provides RESTful HTTP interfaces for programmatically performing Alexa skill management tasks, such as creating a new skill or updating an interaction model.
Alexa-Hosted Skills
Host your cloud infrastructure and application logic with us by selecting the Alexa-Hosted option in the developer console or ASK CLI. Alexa-Hosted Skills is free for almost every skill builder. You can also connect your hosted resources to a personal AWS account and use advanced AWS services.
AWS DevOps Integrations
Collaborate with teams, build faster, and deploy skills more reliably using our integrations with AWS CodeStar, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CloudFormation.
Test Simulator
The test simulator allows you to test your Alexa skill by inputting text or using voice to interact with your skill. Use it in the developer console, the ASK CLI, or SMAPI.
Beta Testing
The skill beta testing tool can be used to test your Alexa skill in beta before releasing it to production. You can invite beta testers by email address.
Utterance Profiler
Use the utterance profiler to test utterances against your skill’s model and see how it selects and considers intents and slots.
NLU Evaluation
Use the natural language understanding (NLU) evaluation tool to create and run a set of tests against your custom interaction model. This tool is especially useful for running regression tests on model changes.
Utterance Conflict Detection
Identify utterances that may accidentally map to multiple intents and reduce accuracy of your skill’s custom interaction model.
ASR Evaluation
Test how Alexa interprets spoken word in the context of your interaction model and address any issues by adding sample utterances or slots to your skill’s intents.
Self-Service Skill Publishing
Submit your skill for review and pick the release date once certified. Available in the developer console and ASK CLI.
Automated Skill Distribution
Give Alexa permission to publish qualified live skills to all locales of the same language.
Alexa Skill Certification
When you submit your skill to the Alexa Skills Store, it must pass a certification process before it can be published live to Amazon customers.
| Date | Name | Summary | Locale Availability | Links | Release Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
7/22/2020 |
ASR Evaluation |
Use ASR Evaluation to measure your skill’s speech recognition with audio files |
All |
GA |
|
7/22/2020 |
Alexa Skills Toolkit for Visual Studio Code |
Build and test Alexa skills locally with VS Code |
All |
GA |
|
7/22/2020 |
Multimodal Responses |
Easily build unified audio and visual responses in your skills |
All |
Preview |
|
7/22/2020 |
Open Source Template Repository for Alexa-Hosted Skills |
Introducing new Alexa-Hosted Skills templates with added feature support |
All |
GA |
