Alexa Skills Kit
Be ready for customers when they ask for you...no hands required.
These step-by-step guides are designed to help you get an Alexa skill up and running quickly. Build your first (or next) skill in under an hour.
Join us for open office hours every Tuesday at 1 p.m. PT. 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.
Natural user interfaces, such as those based on speech, represent the next major disruption in computing. Alexa provides you with an opportunity to take advantage of the new form of interaction.
Engage with your customers through voice on Alexa-enabled devices, including Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, Fire TV devices and all devices powered by the Alexa Voice Service.
Delight your audience with a completely new way to interact with your service. Customers don't need to use their hands or eyes, they only have to "ask" and it's at their command, often becoming a daily habit.
The Alexa Skills Kit is a low-friction way to learn to build for voice. Create your first Alexa skill and add a valuable new "skill" to your developer toolkit. You can get a prototype up and running in just a few hours.
If you have an existing cloud-based service, you can easily use that to start. If not, AWS Lambda makes it really easy to build a cloud-based service that responds quickly to a voice request.
ASK is free to use. AWS Lambda is also free for the first one million calls per month, which can support skill hosting for most developers.
Alexa, Amazon’s cloud-based voice service, powers voice experiences on millions of devices in the home, including Amazon Echo and Echo Dot, Amazon Tap, and Fire TV devices. The Alexa Voice Service (AVS) makes it possible to add voice experiences to any connected hardware that has a speaker and microphone. Now you can use the Smart Home Skill API within the Alexa Skills Kit to easily extend Alexa’s smart home capabilities. You can also create custom skills with ASK. Customers will be able control all their smart home devices simply by using their voice.
How will customers use your skills?
Alexa is the wake word and starts the conversation. Your service gets called when customers use your invocation name, such as "Alexa, ask Greeter to say hello world." This example is a simple command-oriented one. ASK also supports sophisticated multi-command dialogues and parameter passing.
The above example would work like this:
"Alexa" is the wake word that starts the conversation.
"Ask...to" is one of the supported phrases for requesting a service.
"Greeter" is the invocation name that identifies the skill the customer wants.
"Say hello world" is the specific request, question, or command.
Read our getting started guide for an overview of how users interact with your Alexa skill and to learn how to conduct a conversation with your customers. You can also follow these steps:
Design an effective voice user interface to give users a great experience. See Voice Design Best Practices.
Create a framework to map user requests to intents your service can handle. See Defining the Voice User Interface.
Build out sample phrases so that your skill responds to user intents. See Sample Utterances.
Set up your skill in AWS Lambda or another cloud-based hosting service. See Creating a Lambda Function.
Code your skill. See Handling Requests.
Review sample code in Node.js or Java. See Alexa Skills Kit Samples.
Add your skill to the developer portal. See Registering Skills.
Test your skill using our service simulator or on Amazon Echo. See Testing a Skill.
Submit your skill for certification. See Submission Checklist.
Our new fact skill and trivia skill templates make it easy to create skills for Alexa. Simply come up with a simple skill idea, like fact of the day or flash cards, and create your voice app with our new step-by-step guides. Learn more »
See the Big Nerd Ranch blog series for step-by-step instructions to quickly develop and test a Node.js skill using alexa-app and alexa-app-server.
Campbell's Kitchen helps people solve the day's most pressing question—asking Alexa "What's for dinner?" instantly results in meal ideas and recipes. Learn more
Fidelity Investments helps people stay tuned to the financial market by providing real-time insights into market trends. Simply say, "Alexa, Ask Fidelity how {Company Name} is doing." Learn more
