Why Build Alexa Skills?

Alexa is Amazon’s cloud-based voice service and the brain behind tens of millions of devices including the Echo family of devices, FireTV, Fire Tablet, and third-party devices with Alexa built-in. You can build voice experiences, or skills, that make everyday tasks faster, easier, and more delightful for customers.

Tens of thousands of developers have built skills using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples. With ASK, anyone can leverage Amazon’s knowledge in voice design to build quickly and easily. Start building today to reimagine your customer experience for voice and reach customers where they are.

Echo Devices

What You Can Do

Serve Customers Naturally

You can use Amazon’s automatic speech recognition and natural language understanding technology to let people use their voices naturally to interact with your content, services, devices, and more. You can use the Alexa Presentation Language to combine voice with images, audio and video streaming, and touch control to deliver complete, intuitive, and engaging experiences across a wide range of device types.

Expand Your Reach

Customers use Alexa on tens of millions of dedicated devices in the home, like Echo Show and Fire TV, with the Alexa app on iOS and Android phones, and in cars with Alexa Auto. You can entertain, assist, and delight these customers by letting them use their voices to engage with you from different rooms in their homes, in their cars, and anywhere they go.

Make Money in Your Skills

When you build delightful skills with compelling content, customers win. Now you can make money with your Alexa skill in the UK. You can sell premium content to enrich your Alexa skill experience with in-skill purchasing, or offer a new sales channel by selling physical goods and services with Amazon Pay for Alexa skills. You can also get paid for engaging skills that customers love most via Alexa Developer Rewards.

How You Can Build

Code It Yourself Using Our APIs

Build a rich and customized voice experiences that’s all your own using our self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples.

Hire an Agency

Hire a voice design agency to build a voice experience that extends your brand’s reach and deepens customer engagement.

Fill in a Blueprint Template

Create a skill in just minutes using Skill Blueprint templates. You can fill in the blanks or add audio to build quickly and easily.

Learn how to Shape the Future with Voice

Follow our Technical Evangelist Andrea in a course of 11 videos: learn the basics of voice design, master the tools available to developers, create and publish your Alexa Skill in the Alexa Skills Store.

Meet Developers Growing a Voice Business

Richard Matthews

Vocala

Vocala is one of the UK’s fastest growing voice design studios. They create top-rated voice games and interactive experiences with a portfolio that includes popular TV shows such as Deal or No Deal, Pointless and Tenable. They have also developed their own brand titles such as Trivia Blast, Driving Theory and Super Blackjack. Learn more about making money with Alexa skills.

Liam Sorta

MagicVoice.io

MagicVoice.io is a voice studio aiming to push the limits of immersive technology through the research and development of new skills. With many successful skills under their belt, they focus on perfecting user experience, bleeding-edge use cases for voice, and providing true value to businesses.

Craig Wills

Hi Mum! Said Dad

HMSD is a digital product and innovation consultancy. They have developed some of the most engaging Alexa Skills including BBC Good Food and WaterAid Voices and are one of the agencies featured by Amazon at alexa.design/agencies. Learn more about making money with Alexa skills.

Example Skill Types

Explore common skill types by choosing one of the examples below.

Game Skills
Kid Skills
Content Skills
Music Skills

Alexa Skills Kit Capabilities

An Alexa skill includes a voice user interface, or VUI, to understand customer intents, and a back-end cloud service to process intents and tell Alexa how to respond. You can use capabilities in the Alexa Skills Kit to deliver both.

ASR and NLU

Alexa converts spoken words to text using automatic speech recognition (ASR), deduces the speaker’s meaning using natural language understanding (NLU), and provides the underlying customer intent to your skill.

Learn more: Alexa ASR and NLU

Native and Custom Voice Interfaces

You can take advantage of native voice user interfaces for smart home, music, video, and flash briefing skills, or define your own custom voice user interface.

Learn more: Custom interaction models

Support for Multiple Languages, Countries

You can create skills in multiple languages. A skill can support a single language or any combination of the available languages.

Learn more: Available languages

Multimodal Input and Response

You can use text-to-speech (TTS) and audio streams to respond to customer queries. You can add visual elements and touch inputs on Alexa-compatible devices with displays, and can add support for Echo Buttons.

Learn more: Multimodal experiences

In-Skill Purchasing and Amazon Pay

You can make money through Alexa skills using in-skill purchasing (ISP) or Amazon Pay for Alexa Skills. You define your product offering and price, and Amazon handles the voice purchasing flow.

Learn more: Make money with Alexa

Flexible Back End Support

You can write your back-end web service using any programming language and host it in either AWS Lambda or the HTTPS server of your choice. You can use ASK SDKs to get started quickly and take advantage of AWS promotional credits for Alexa.

Learn more: ASK SDKs and AWS credits

What's New

Learn about all new release feature updates here.

New Tools Give You Better Control of Publishing, Distribution, and Permissions
Add Visuals to Your Skills with New Alexa Presentation Language (APL) Support for Responsive Components and Templates, Dynamic Data Sources, New Time Primitives, and Conditional Commands
Designing Skills for ISP, Part 5: Providing Access to Purchases
subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to Our Newsletter

Next Steps