Create Skills for Alexa-Enabled Devices With a Screen

Alexa-enabled devices with a screen, such as Echo Show, Echo Spot and Fire TV Cube, allow skill developers to create skills for Alexa that use both screen and voice interaction. The screen displays and interactions are created with the use of templates and the Display interface, as described in this reference.

Configure Your Skill to Support Display on Alexa-Enabled Devices With a Screen

The process to enable the use of the Display.RenderTemplate directive, which is the directive used to display content on a screen, is the same for a new skill, or for an existing skill.

1. Edit your skill in the developer console.

2. Navigate to the Build > Custom > Interfaces page.

3. Enable the Display Interface option, then click Build Model to re-build your interaction model. When you enable Display Interface, the required built-in intents are automatically added to your interaction model.

4. In your skill service code, determine what interfaces the customer's device supports, so that your skill service then provides the appropriate responses with the appropriately rendered content, including display if desired and supported. To determine the supported interfaces, parse the value of event.context.System.device.supportedInterfaces in the Alexa request. The value of supportedInterfaces determines the interfaces supported by the customer's device.

5. If the Display interface is supported, include the Display.RenderTemplate directive in your skill responses to display content on screen as appropriate, just as you would include other directives, as shown in the examples below. As a developer, you can choose not to include any display content, but cards that display in the Alexa app will also appear on the customer's device. See Display Interface Reference.

For a tutorial on how to create a skill that supports Alexa-enabled devices with a screen, see Display Interface Skill for Echo Show.