How To Develop Alexa Skills And An iOS Mobile App
Making an engaging and useful Alexa skill for a mobile app is only possible by using Amazon Skills kit. By following the guidelines you can easily make Alexa skill for your app or product. Most of your competitors have already integrated this voice technology so don't fall behind!
Last year more than 5 million Amazon Echo devices were sold worldwide and more than three thousand Alexa Skills were developed for it.
According to a certain report, by 2018 about 30% of interactions with smart machines will be done through voice and voice interaction. It will be the next big shift in how our users interact with their devices.
As the Amazon Echo and Alexa have been achieving immense fame and more people are using smart devices, it is worth expecting that the new products and software should integrate voice functionality.
For almost every business, it’s time to embrace this voice technology and start seeking opportunities to integrate it with their applications or products.
Now the big question for you is how can you build Alexa skills. Here we will enlighten you with an overview of Amazon Alexa Skill development so that you can better convey your idea to the developers and understand every aspect of the development procedure.
Making Use Of Amazon Alexa Skills Kit
Recently, Amazon has introduced a quite effective system for developers to create Alexa Skills. It is freely available to download through Amazon. This Alexa Skills Kit offered by Amazon performs all of the complex language processing. What developers need to do is handle the text and user information in the app, then send a text back to the Alexa Skills Kit so as convert it into sound and a reply to the Amazon Echo user.
You can process Alexa requests by any of the two options:
Use AWS Lambda Functions
The best way to process Alexa requests is to utilize the AWS Lambda, which is a service that runs the code as a response to triggers and also manages the computer resources in the Amazon Web Services Cloud. Developers need to upload the code for the new Alexa skill they want to build and AWS Lambda implements the code in reply to Alexa voice interactions. With this way, you only have to pay for the processing that you are using, and it can scale much due to its ability to run in AWS.
Send The Data To A URL On The Internet
With this approach, you will need to face several things that you don’t have to concern while using AWS Lambda. In order to send the data to a URL for an app and server that you run, you will need to pay for maintaining that server, and also have ensured that the server and application are scaled with the feasible demand getting from all the possible Alexa requests.
Releasing Amazon Alexa Skill
When it comes to releasing Alexa skills in the Amazon’s Alexa service, it quite different from how apps are released in the app store, since both possess some firm requirements.
After completing the Alexa Skill development and testing process, decide to set up your skill for beta testing to a specific group of users. While submitting your skill to the Alexa Store, it must have to pass a certification procedure before it can get published live to Amazon customers.
In order to ensure that whether your Alexa skill will meet the certification requirements or not, you will have to follow all of the testing mentioned in the Certification Requirements for Custom Skills.
When your Alexa skill is published to the end users, the skill's status will change to live. You are not able to modify the configuration for a live skill. For this another development version is automatically generated in the developer portal.
This version consist the same information like the original live version. You can make use of it for continuing to work on your skill to make it better and add extra features.
Conclusion:
Making an engaging and useful Alexa skill for a mobile app is only possible by using Amazon Skills kit in a precise way. By following these guidelines you can easily make Alexa skill for your app or product. Most of your competitors have already integrated this voice technology with their business services so as to serve new-fangled experience to their customers. Now it’s your turn to build next incredible Alexa Skill.