Today I wanted to write a blog about Amazon Alexa skills. I have been interested in the Alexa program. I have been involved in the Amazon Alexa developer program since 2017. I have completed a challenge held by Amazon, and I have one and Amazon Echo Dot. I have also won a hoodie. I finally completed a skill and won a nice gray backpack that says Amazon Alexa developer on it.
You can look at the Alexa flash briefing that I created for the echo system by searching for the Billy Newman photo flash briefing. Using the echo to develop a flash briefing is an exciting way to produce some audio content. While looking at the Amazon Alexa developer portal, I saw what different things could be built.
According to the Amazon Alexa developer skill website, the Alexa skills kit has a wide variety of programming tools you can use and results that you can make. Here are some things you can build.
Game skills allow a voice game to give customers a new experience, including interactive adventures and quiz games.
Music and audio skills, the scale allows customers to access music or podcasts or streaming radio services.
Food ordering skills, this tool kit allows customers to find nearby restaurants and offers a message to order.
Home skills, this Amazon kit allows customers to control cloud-connected devices using Alexa.
Flash briefing and news skills, this kid makes it easy for customers to get the latest news headlines and other sorts of short audio and text as part of daily routines.
Knowledge skills: This tool kit allows developers to create Q and skills quickly using spreadsheets without writing code.
Amazon Alexa Skill Developer Program
If you have a background in programming languages, a command-line in Amazon is available for you to use as a programming terminal. This allows you a custom development environment for you to work on your skills.
If you have not developed a program before, the Alexa flash briefing kit and Alexa developer kit allow for some no-code skills. I created an Alexa flash briefing that required almost no coding. The process was similar to filling out a form of questions. I provided a specific link to an RSS feed that was configured correctly. This allowed me to complete an Alexa flash briefing skills submission in a short amount of time.
I hope to try and take advantage of the opportunity to reach people using the echo and Alexa platforms. There is a large audience of individuals using the skills systems to gather more information through audio on the Alexa platform. I hope to work on creating information skills and text-based audio skills using Alexa in the future.
Currently, I have created two Alexa flash breathing skills. In addition, I have created the Billy Newman photo flash briefing. Finally, I have also created the Night Sky podcast/briefing. I was very interested to see that there was a real spike in traffic for that feed when I created the flash briefing. I don’t have a draw of a lot of traffic. I am not sure if artificial server traffic went to the field once I submitted it to Amazon. However, I have received several reviews and notes from real people who have heard and seen the content. And it does seem that it was distributed to a larger audience than some of my other content.
I hope to continue working on the Amazon Alexa developer platform. I am considering ways to make more practical audio/briefings for the Amazon skill library. I am also looking at other tools and options for me to create on the echo platform. Thank you for looking at some of the ideas that I have had in this blog post today.
Amazon Alexa Skill Developer Program
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