Tag: How to Build an Alexa Skill

A Comprehensive Guide on How to Build an Alexa Skill – An Expert’s Take

Posted on by Surbhi Sharma

Amazon Alexa is one of the innovative and sought-after voice assistants in the market. The voice interactions, coupled with artificial intelligence, facilitates everything from ordering food to setting up a quick reminder. These skills offered by Alexa radically expand the bots repertoire, allowing the users to perform more tasks using a voice-enabled device.

Voice technology has become a boon for the people and rapidly made a statement in the market Presently, there are more than 30M Amazon Echoes in the U.S. and 80,000 Alexa skills in the market. Such exponential growth has stimulated many businesses to develop Alexa skills and embrace the great opportunities brought forth by voice technology.

To help businesses leverage this groundbreaking innovation, we have shed light on how to build an Alexa Skill with a frictionless voice user interface (VUI) in the below.

So, let’s dive in..

Factors to consider while building an Alexa Skill

An Alexa skill must have a great Voice User Interface (VUI), which improves the voice recognition and responsiveness of the device. It depends on the various factors including, providing the right help and proper data to users, making skill flow feel like real conversations, and not forcing users to listen long content. Focusing on the below-mentioned points will help you to design and create the best and frictionless VUI.

Invocation Name: Invocation is used to invoke or start a skill. Alexa skills developers keep it precise, meaningful, clear, and easy to remember as users have to call the skill’s name to invoke it. Ideally, a skill name should comprise two words and match with the whole invocation sentence. For instance, Alexa, Play Soft Music – Here, “Soft Music” is the invocation name.

Intent: Intent is simply each task or function performed by a skill. Different intents are used to perform different tasks. So, if there is a skill to turn on/off the AC, it may have one intent for turning on/off light and another for adding a new user.

Utterances: Utterances are the sentences that users can use to navigate to a particular intent or open a specific stage inside the skill. Due to the variation and flexibility of spoken language in the real world, there will probably be ample ways to express a request. So, make sure to write as many utterances as possible while building an Alexa skill. For example, if you develop an Alexa skill for Horoscope and users want to know their horoscope, utterances can be:

  • What is the horoscope
  •  Get me my horoscope
  • Tell me the horoscope
  •   How’s my horoscope today

Though Alexa is smart enough to automatically understand similar sentences, it is a good idea to add multiple utterances to a skill.

Technical Aspects:

Designing for voice is way different than designing for a screen. The Alexa skill designers practice a real conversation like the one Alexa will initiate when a user gives a command before or during designing a skill.

The most important aspect of Alexa skills is that users never have to download them as they completely run on the cloud. They only need to enable them to leverage them.

When it comes to Alexa skill development, Amazon provides Alexa Skill Kit (ASK), which facilitates the development of the skills. There are majorly two sections for developing an Alexa Skill:

1.    Amazon Developer Console: Amazon Developer Console offers the best Graphical User interface for creating Alexa skills. It contains information about Alexa skills, including invocation, intents, utterances, and endpoints. Using the Amazon Console, we can also distribute skills and set a Beta Test.

2.     Backend: Since Alexa skills completely run on Cloud, they require a backend or an endpoint. We can either create it on AWS Lambda or Own Server.

a)    AWS Lambda: It provides a ready-to-go setup, and we don’t have to create an SSL secured server.

b)    Own Server: In this case, we need to have SSL enabled server running on port 443 only. We can use Flask or any other framework as a server.

The server will have to manage the JSON request from Alexa and also provide a JSON response. Both AWS Lambda and Own Server will perform the same functions internally.

Takeaway

Now, you’re familiar with all the ins and outs of how to develop an Alexa skill. If you’re seeking professional Alexa Skill development services, you can count on us. We will leverage our technical expertise and forward-thinking approach to providing you step-by-step guidance and voicing your business with a voice-enabled device integrated with the best Alexa skills.

4 Inventive Ways Brands Leverage Alexa Skills for Content Marketing

Posted on by Abhishek Kalyan

In this cutting-edge competition, it is essential to adopt emerging marketing technologies and comprehend how they can carry off annual goals for content planning. Nowadays, voice technology has gained traction among content strategists, and thus business owners are building Alexa skills to churn out useful consumer content.

In 2018, a host of brands partnered with an Alexa sill development company to voice their business, but not all brands could do well. Creating a skill without clear objectives and brand authority behind it is unlikely to yield the expected outcomes. You must have an idea of how to build an Alexa skill, identify a voice for your brand, create music and audio cues, offer relevant information, and intelligently craft a call-to-action (CTA) for your voice platform.

Fortunately, several brands have already exploited the Alexa skills as well as voice technology, providing examples of what is beneficial for this new content platform and what isn’t. Meticulously understanding what they have done the best and what they could have done better can steer your way toward launching your own skill.

Below are some examples of inventive ways brands use Alexa skills for content marketing.

Ask Purina

The Ask Purina provides comprehensive information on a variety of dog breeds. The brand endeavors to help aspiring dog owners to choose the ideal breed that suffices their needs and preferences. Users can search specific dog breed name, energy level, size, living considerations, family fit, shedding level, or narrow their search by specifying hypoallergenic using the following utterances:

  • Alexa, “tell me about dogs that are good with children.”
  • Alexa, “find breeds that are good in apartments.”
  • Alexa, “tell me about dogs that are hypoallergenic.”
  • Alexa, “tell me about dogs that don’t shed.”

Users praise the detailed and quality information provided by the skill and also seem to appreciate its integration with Amazon Echo Show devices.

Zyrtec – Your Daily Allergy Cast

If you ever had allergies, you likely understand how sniffling and watery eyes can ruin your day and deter you from an outing. Zyrtec, an Allergy medicine brand, joined hand with an Alexa skill development company to create an excellent skill that helps people evaluate pollen count, weather, and allergens in their region before they step out. It also provides a personal Allergy Impact Score that indicates users how the allergens might make them feel. The brand has played smartly by encouraging users to choose medicines for a variety of allergy issues. The overall concept of this Alexa skill offers a solid example of how content marketers create useful, relevant, and exciting voice content for their brands.

Johnnie Walker

Whiskey epicures are pretty serious about their consumption. Johnnie walker brought forth an Alexa skill for content marketing and offering options to their customers to choose a label as per their preferences, learn a little more about whiskey, buy a bottle, or partake in a guided tasting. Users must be at least 21 years old to access the skill. This skill is an excellent instance of how a brand can maintain consistent engagement and relevance while offering a piece of voice content from which consumers can garner information.

Tide – Stain Remover

The Tide Stain Remover skill is a brilliant and exemplary technique of content marketing. The brand has implemented a “stain remover” skill, with the help of Alexa skill developers, which includes step-by-step voice guidance on how to remove over 200 types of stains. It provides useful content to consumers who need support for removing a stain and establishes the goodwill of the company.

Takeaway

Before you adopt this voice approach for your brand enhancement, conduct meticulous research of the current market. This will help you garner a comprehensive understanding of what consumers need and how you can live up to their expectations. Besides, you have an additional advantage of having a glance at tactics of the early Alexa skills adopters to identify details that make as well as break the reputation of a brand.

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