Creating Alexa Skills: How to Program Skills

Skills let you add a lot more features to Alexa. In our instructions, we show you how to create and program a skill yourself.

Create Alexa Skill: What Kinds of Skills Are There?

"Alexa" is the name of Amazon's digital voice assistant. Companies and private individuals can integrate this into certain hardware using the Alexa Voice Service (AVS).

• With no extensions, Alexa can answer some knowledge questions, control smart home devices, or buy products from Amazon.
• As a developer, you can use the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) to create your own Alexa apps to teach Alexa more skills.
• On the one hand, there are smart home skills for controlling networked devices, as well as flash briefing skills as another news source for the daily summary ("Flash Brief"), or custom interaction model skills for all other interactions with Alexa.
• In order to create a skill, you need an Amazon developer account. You can create and configure new skills in the developer portal.
• The actual logic of skills can be integrated as a web service via HTTPS. Amazon calls these web services SkillServices. Amazon recommends its own service "AWS Lambda" as a backend.

Amazon Echo: What do you need to consider when programming skills?

You can easily create a skill with the "Alexa Skills Kit", which you can find on the developer console. Before you start programming a skill, you should ask yourself a few questions:

• First of all, the question arises how the user should call up the skill and how the user can activate individual functions. Therefore, first define key terms.
• It is also important to know what the sentence must be and whether there are regional differences.
• The more flexible the request, the better the user experience. For example, a skill should always respond to the word "help" and explain to the user how to interact with it.

Program skill for Alexa

First you have to create an account for the developer console and for AWS.

• First click on the "Alexa" tab in the developer console and click on "Get Started" under "Alexa Skills Kit".
• Then click on "Add a New Skill".
• Now you can start to configure and set up your skill. To avoid having to set up an HTTPS server, you can use AWS.
• You program the actual skill in interaction mode. You program in Java Script. You can find help on the Amazon homepage.

In the next practical tip we will show you how you can create your own mod for the Minecraft Pocket Edition.