What Are Amazon Skills and How Do You Use Them?

In 1994, a 30-year old Jeffery introduced his online company, registered under the name “Cadabra”. This enterprise became what we know nowadays as Amazon. Subsequently services such as Alexa or Amazon Skills became popular. The name was changed to be easily reached in online search results.

Today, Jeff Bezos’ net worth is 165.6 billion USD. This number is a substantial leap from his previous status as an aspiring business owner, now acting as a defining pillar of the market flow worldwide.

Amazon became available for public participation in 1997. Starting initially to trade in selling books and videos. The commercial empire now works with artificial intelligence, cloud computing, e-commerce, and even the video streaming service Twitch.

The commercial powerhouse now contributes to multiple aspects of business all around the World. Amazon even announced that they may start to create a video games platform, competing with Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

What Does the Amazon Website Provide?

Amazon provides a myriad of services, such as the following:

Amazon Appstore

The Amazon appstore caters to users of the Amazon Echo family. Apps can be used through Alexa and other echo devices, allowing for wholesome integration with the other members of the Amazon Echo family.

Amazon Dash

This domain is more suitable for standalone, autonomous tasks. Amazon Dash incorporates Amazon Skills kit and blueprints to help you create skills that replenish items before they expire.

Think of it as a service that functions like direct debit instructions or standing orders with banks. Amazon Dash services allows you to reorder kitchen supplies, groceries, etc., before they are finished. This can be done by a simple click.

Alternatively, Amazon Dash services can create a fixed date for the order or track the consumption based on a pre-set ratio. Before the date or a critical value of the provision, Amazon Dash contacts the appropriate supplier. Then, it arranges a delivery time based on your schedule in a hassle-free manner.

Amazon Dash bypasses the hassle of maintaining a grocery to-do list for people by running weekly or monthly errands. It’s a great way to divert the workload of chores to be automated.

Other Amazon Services via Developer Centre

The Amazon development centre is an amazing resource for those who want to utilize the previous success of certain skills and seek guidance. It provides users with Amazon Skill tools, feedback, and walkthroughs for simple codes and blueprints.

If it simply works, there is no need to change it, right?

What Is Alexa?

In November 2014, Amazon Alexa was released to be a part of the Amazon Echo family.

Amazon Alexa is a technological breakthrough and considered to be a milestone in the world of virtual assistants.

Alexa, the brainchild of Amazon, is a cloud-based voice service that operates through various Amazon devices—sometimes dubbed the Amazon Echo family—or with other third-party devices that have Alexa built-in support.

Amazon’s Alexa is not the first virtual assistant to be released for use by the public. However, it’s one of the best, dominating the market, and it helped redefine the concept of a fully integrated smart home.

By the end of 2018, it’s revealed that the United States alone has 43 million citizens who own smart speakers solutions.

What Are Amazon Alexa Skills?

Alexa is basically a cloud-based AI. It’s a service that accumulates information that facilitates the creation of templates or parameters for certain pre-set actions.

Alexa functions with the help of Amazon Skills. We can define Amazon Skills as functions that enhance and complement Alexa’s basic functions. Consider it as pre-set parameters, or a modification whilst keeping key abstract features. Amazon Skills can be considered as forms of apps for Alexa functions.

Amazon Skills can engage the users in naturally engaging voice experiences, allowing for energetic smart home solutions with games and entertainment.

Moreover, Amazon skills can utilize the Amazon echo family to tweak with visual and audio experiences. These skills can set the house for a party or a presentation for those who seek to make use of space according to the setting.

Users can actually create Amazon Skills. Amazon Skills developers are not short on innovation and ideas that can enrich the smart home experience. Theses skills users can create unique and organic voice experiences.

Can You Sell Alexa Skills?

You may be new to the term Amazon developers. They not only exist, they maintain a supporting platform, as well. Amazon developers can work within the platform to create different types of Amazon Skills.

The website provides information and tutorials helping to create skills within specific types of skills.

These skills can be created in an easier manner using blueprints. The blueprints feature was launched in 2018, opening the platform to create skills to those with minimal coding experience. The Amazon blueprint helps the casual user to build personalized skills for their own use.

In February 2019, Amazon allowed Skills users to publish their skills in Alexa skills store. In turn, allowing users to monetize these skills and further expand the reach of Amazon skills.

Users can profit from their Skills through Amazon Skills Store purchases or subscriptions.
The developers can usually create personalized game shows, narration of stories, interactive to-do lists, and many more.

What Are the Types of Amazon Skills?

Amazon skills can be one of the following:

Gaming Skills

Gaming skills are Amazon Skills that allow you to create family-friendly and entertaining skills that enable voice-based games. These skills can be, amongst others, voice-activated game shows or gaming features accessible through Amazon Echo suite.

Gaming skills can allow you to play Bingo or Akinator while you are making your breakfast or allow you to play chess with a friend while reading a book and relaxing.

Music Skills

You can use Amazon skills to play music depending on the weather or the time of the day. You can even allow certain preset skills to play a certain playlist once you get home. Of course, you can allow Alexa to play similar music to your favourite playlist.
These music skills can be activated through speakers paired with the Alexa via wi-fi.

Video Skills

Video skills are similar to music skills—and one and the same sometimes. These skills are Amazon skills related to activation via video interface as a part of the Amazon Echo devices that support video display.

Smart Home Skills

Smart home skills are pillars to what defines Alexa as we know it.
Such skills allow integrated electronic security locks, managing the lightning system, or controlling curtains remotely. These skills are mostly concerned with making the home an integrated unit, all controlled as simply as saying “Alexa, close the curtains.”
Usually, smart home skills control devices with Wi-Fi-paired devices.

Kids Skills

Amazon kids skills are considered as natural extensions of Smart home skills. There skills allow an enriching and nurturing environment for children.

Parents can ensure that their children are striving in a healthy environment by employing kids skills. Amazon kids skills allow homeowners to add skills that engage their children with exploration and educational premises.

These kids-friendly skills can answer their questions about historical events, scientific facts, or else that would pique their interests in a child-friendly manner.

It’s possible to employ Alexa’s aid to lock away harmful or distressing content for children. Moreover, Alexa can impose parental control on children’s interactions with technology and home entertainment systems.

Whether to play Elmo’s street or ask Alexa to tell them an enticing story, Alexa is surely to deliver beautiful home experiences for children.

Flash Briefing Skills

Flash briefing skills were one of the lucrative aspects of Alexa’s smart home experience. These skills update the user with news and notifications about activities, sports, news, and economical news that they would be interested in.

How Can You Add Amazon Skills to Alexa?

There are many ways to add Amazon skills to your Alexa or Amazon Echo system. The most common and simple of them is to ask Alexa to add these skills for you via voice commands.

For example, you may want to add the “Music Alarm” Amazon skill. To do that, you can simply wake up Alexa by either calling for the default wake up command, Alexa, or by calling your custom wake up command. Then you simply ask Alexa to add the Music alarm skill.

On the other hand, if you are more of a visual person, you can use the Alexa app or Amazon’s website to find more about the skills you would like to add.

You can ask Alexa to recommend skills that are suitable for you and your needs, depending on your usage.

Alexa for Business

Alexa for private use in homes is a vital aspect of the product’s targeted demographics. However, one cannot deny the appeal of Alexa for business.

The business suite acts as the perfect virtual assistant. For instance, in a meeting room where sometimes you would need an instant feed of updated information regarding the meeting’s topic, Alexa can assist you and any of the attending members by providing valuable information when needed.

This is simply possible by asking Alexa to join the active meeting and communicate with the necessary parties in the case of the meeting taking a while longer than planned. Alexa can plan another room for the meeting or help extend the booking of the meeting room accordingly. Moreover, the meeting doesn’t need the entire party to be in the same room, as it can be carried on remotely via Alexa Echo devices from anywhere.

Alexa for business can allow employees to attend meetings from home, should the need arise.

When needed, Alexa can be an extension of the business’ employees by allowing them access to the corporate apps and specific skills assigned to the company. This can be done anywhere using any of Alexa-supported devices and by simply asking Alexa to activate the corporate app or skill.

What Is Amazon In-Skill Purchasing?

There are many ways to develop Amazon skills for Alexa and the rest of the Amazon Echo family.

One of the features of Amazon skills is the in-skill purchasing. Basically, in-skill purchasing allows users to have access to great additional content from the skills they are already using.

Amazon developers can be either dedicated, seasoned developers or freelancers. As a matter of fact, it’s becoming a lucrative medium for developers to freelance and create skills.

Users can purchase these skill from Alexa’s store in three forms as following:

One-Time Purchases

The benefits of the given skill are available entirely for good, i.e., they don’t expire. One time purchases are more suitable for high demand skills. It’s considered to be the most preferable type of payment for users.

Moreover, it’s favourable for consumers, as well. The consumer just pays a given amount one time and doesn’t need to reconsider the need to renew subscription later on.

Consumables

Consumables are similar to candy crush hearts and bonuses in mobile apps. They are repeat purchases that can be depleted and repurchased again should the need arise.

Subscriptions

Subscriptions are usually paid in monthly, semi-annually, annually or in any other fixed time frame to offer premium content and additional benefits to be accessed by the users.

What’s a Voice Marketing Optimization Strategy?

Nowadays, voice searching is becoming more common than before. Many people use their speakers for their voice searches as much as they use the keyboard.

Marketing always tends to find ways to utilize venues of usage to reach the highest possible exposure from people. The higher the exposure, the higher the rate of conversation—converting possible customers to actual customers, paid customers.

It’s no surprise that marketeers took interest in voice search platforms such as Alexa. This led to methods that would allow them to utilize products to reach people through such a peculiar medium.

Voice Marketing using Alexa Skills

One of the most challenging issues in marketing is customer interaction. By interaction we mean the effort, actions, and lengths the customers need to perform and go to in order to close the deal once they are interested in purchasing a certain product or skill.

There is a reason why sales management do their best to minimize this process as much as possible. Some companies market their product with the strategy of focusing on making the process of payment easier compared to their peers.

Customers may lose interest in the product if the process of purchase is taking too much time or effort, even slightly above minimal.

That’s where the most appealing aspect of voice marketing is; it requires basically minimal to no effort at all from the customer to purchase the product. All they need is to confirm their voice command to the smart assistant and the deal is sealed.

That’s what voice marketing strategy aims at, aside from focusing on the brand’s tone of voice, giving it an enticing, engaging, and a real tone of voice that compels the customer to become a part of the product’s customer base.

Based on the user’s search and preferences, voice marketing can utilize voice-based search results through voice engine optimization.

What Is Voice Engine Optimization?

Voice engine optimization is relatively a new form of marketing. This young concept is growing exponentially in the world of voice search.

Similar to search engine optimization, voice engine optimization, a term patented by Chatmeter, is about making businesses websites optimized for voice search, allowing it to reach a wider range of customers who frequently use voice search rather than just typing online.

The benefit of this practice is that the voice search customer base is usually more versatile that the tech-savvy online crowd, even by a little—a little sometimes isn’t too little in marketing and exposure.

How to Use Amazon Skills to Voice-Optimize Your Product?

There are various steps business owners can go through to ensure that their content gets high hits in voice search results.

Here are some of these steps:

Update Your Data

To avoid your website getting inaccurate flags from users and reviews, always try to keep data about your products and contact info accurate and updated.

Aside from the technical benefits, having viable contact info ensures that the customer gains additional trust in your products and services provided.

Faster Loading Sites Means Faster Results

Imagine an impatient father driving with his kids on the weekend and just talked into his phone, asking Siri, Alexa, or Google assistant for the nearest kids-friendly dinner.

The results may take an additional second. All that it takes is this additional second for him to spot a nearby McDonald’s.

While there were at least three suitable dinners around the next corner, the family will end up having their lunch in McDonald’s, because it was just there.

Faster sites means faster results for shorter attention spans. Most mobile users who are asking for directions or suggestions for places need faster results to cater to on-the-move nature. In a way, faster sites means that you will be there when someone searches for your services.

Provide Answers

Remember the exhausted parent? Most probably, his request from his smart assistant was a question “Hey, Alexa, where is the nearest family diner?”

Arranging your content in a way to answer questions is one of the fastest ways to cater to your customers’ potential and actual questions and needs. The golden rule here is faster response for shorter attention spans.

Benefits of digital voice assistants are aplenty, from assisting the visually impaired, creating an engaging, secure, and nurturing environment for children through smart homes, saving time and effort for users to look for anything up, and becoming a universal, one to-go virtual remote. Voice assistants advantages continue to grow by the day.

What Are the Benefits of Voice Engine Optimization?

Voice engine optimization helps to widely spread the exposure of your product due to many reasons:

Tailored for Similar Content

A successful voice optimization process helps link the content to the users who would be most likely interested in it. such a process creates a customized, tailored advertisement.

Reaching Different Customer Bases in Their First Language

Alexa supports other languages besides English. Widening the reach of your ads beyond the language barrier can help maximize the exposure of your product.

Word Count Doesn’t Matter Much Like It Does in SEO

A common practice when choosing keywords for SEO in written content is to avoid complicated phrases. The core of written content is that shorter, precise words help to properly index content.

Such an approach makes the content easier on the eye for the user as their attention span my elude the end result.

In voice search scenario, this may not be necessary. People who use voice search usually ask questions. These questions can be lengthy and it will not affect the results.

Voice search users’ queries can be categorized easily from directly and indirectly related queries.

Amazon is working on delivering more benefits and improvements upon the prominent Alexa, e.g., additional improved amazon skills, various venues of smart home enhancement, and many others.

Aside from the monetary benefits for users and developers, Amazon skills employed by Alexa are integrating a living ecosystem in their smart homes suites for families to enjoy. This ecosystem utilizes every capability and aspect developers could think of to provide custom-made, tailored solutions.

What is an AI without a proper thinking methodology? Amazon skills answer this question with a better one – How can we employ technology for better services for mankind?

Comparison of Voice Assistant Skills Platforms:

Feature	Amazon Skills	Google Assistant	Siri	Bixby
Skill Library Size	Largest (~100,000+)	Growing rapidly	Smaller, high-quality focus	Moderate, Samsung device focused
Smart Home Compatibility	Extensive, diverse brands	Strong, popular brands	Limited to Apple HomeKit	Primarily Samsung devices
Natural Language Understanding	Good	Excellent	Excellent	Developing
Integration with Other Services	Primarily Amazon ecosystem	Deep integration with Google services	Seamless with Apple services	Strong with Samsung services
Music & Audio Services	Seamless with Spotify, Audible	Seamless with Google Play Music, additional steps for others	Integrated with Apple Music	Integrated with Samsung Music, limited others
Privacy Concerns	Data collection practices raise concerns	Relatively less data collection	High emphasis on privacy	Some concerns with Samsung data collection
Device Compatibility	Primarily Amazon devices	Works across various devices	Apple devices only	Primarily Samsung devices
Strengths	Wide range of skills, smart home compatibility, strong music integration	Information retrieval, Google service integration, natural language understanding	Privacy, Apple ecosystem integration, high-quality skills	Samsung service integration, smart home control (Samsung devices)
Weaknesses	Skill quality can vary, discovery challenging	Smaller skill library, limited smart home compatibility	Limited device compatibility	Skill library size, primarily Samsung ecosystem

The Future of Amazon Skills: Where Voice Assistants Are Headed

The world of voice skills is evolving rapidly, with Amazon Skills holding a commanding position. But what does the future hold for this exciting technology? Here are some trends and advancements we can expect in the years to come:

1. Deeper Personalization and Context Awareness:

• Skills will move beyond basic commands to understand user preferences, routines, and emotions.
• Contextual awareness will allow skills to anticipate needs and proactively offer suggestions.
• Imagine a skill that automatically dims the lights and plays relaxing music when you say “I’m stressed.”

2. Multi-modal Interactions and Enhanced AI:

• Speech will be combined with gestures, facial expressions, and even biometrics for richer interactions.
• Advanced AI algorithms will power more natural and engaging conversations, mimicking human-to-human interaction.
• This could lead to virtual assistants that become true companions, offering advice, emotional support, and even entertainment.

3. Enhanced Smart Home Integration and Automation:

• Skills will seamlessly control all aspects of the smart home, from appliances and lighting to security and temperature.
• Imagine a skill that automatically prepares your coffee and adjusts the thermostat when you wake up.
• Proactive automation will learn your daily habits and anticipate your needs, creating a truly smart and responsive environment.

4. Focus on Health and Wellness:

• Skills will be used for health monitoring, medication reminders, and even mental health support.
• Voice-activated fitness routines, personalized nutrition advice, and mindfulness exercises are just a few potential applications.
• Voice assistants could become crucial partners in managing our health and well-being.

5. Democratization of Skill Development:

• Easy-to-use tools will enable anyone, not just programmers, to create and publish their own skills.
• This will lead to an explosion of niche and personalized skills catering to specific needs and interests.
• Imagine a world where your grandma can create a skill that reads her favorite stories to your children.

6. Ethical Considerations and Data Privacy:

• As skills become more integrated into our lives, concerns about data privacy and ethical use of AI will intensify.
• Transparency, user control over data, and responsible development practices will be crucial.
• The future of voice skills relies on building trust and ensuring technology serves humanity in a positive light.

In conclusion, the future of Amazon Skills is brimming with possibilities. The evolution of AI, personalization, and multi-modal interactions will transform how we interact with technology, potentially ushering in a new era of intelligent assistants that truly enhance our lives.

Amazon Skills: FAQ

Q: Which platform has the best voice assistant skills?

A: It depends on your individual needs and preferences. Amazon Skills boasts the largest library and strong smart home compatibility, while Google Assistant excels in natural language understanding and Google service integration. Siri excels in privacy and Apple ecosystem integration, while Bixby is strong for Samsung device and service integration. Consider your priorities and device compatibility before making a decision.

Q: Are Amazon Skills safe to use?

A: While data collection practices associated with some skills raise concerns, Amazon offers measures like skill reviews and privacy settings to help users control their data. Be mindful of the permissions you grant to skills and choose reputable developers.

Q: How can I create my own Amazon Skill?

A: Amazon provides resources and tools to make skill development accessible. There are online tutorials, documentation, and even the Alexa Skills Kit, a platform for building and testing skills. While programming experience is helpful, some basic skills can be created with visual development tools.

Q: What are the ethical considerations with voice assistants?

A: Bias in AI algorithms, data privacy, and potential security risks are important concerns. Choosing platforms with transparent practices and using skills responsibly are crucial. As voice assistants become more integrated into our lives, ethical development and user trust will be increasingly important.

Amazon Skills: Conclusion

Amazon Skills have revolutionized the way we interact with technology, offering countless functionalities and integrations. With advancements in AI, personalization, and multi-modal interactions, the future of voice skills is exciting and full of potential. From enhanced smart home control to personalized health and wellness support, the possibilities are vast.

Remember, the key to reaping the benefits of voice assistants is to choose them wisely, use them responsibly, and stay informed about their capabilities and limitations. By actively engaging with this evolving technology, we can ensure it serves humanity in a positive and enriching way.