Alexa

I like building Alexa Skills. Skills are Amazon’s name of the apps that run inside Amazon’s Echo and other Alexa products. Building skills is a good way for me to understand how Alexa works and it’s a pretty neat party trick to get Alexa to pretend that she knows me.

Building skills used to be difficult. You needed to know how to program a voice user interface. Alexa soon came out with templates which made things easier but still required you to know how to program and so some basic system administration. I persisted in building a simple trivia game and Amazon sent me a T-Shirt for having published one of the first 1000 skills.

My Shirt for Building One of the First Thousand Alexa Skills (Front)

My Shirt for Building One of the First Thousand Alexa Skills (Back)

I remember thinking, “Where can Alexa be useful to me?” At the time, my boys were just starting to learn peoples birthdays. So I started building a skill for family birthdays. This was a great way to drill them on an important topic until they memorized it.

Alexa would ask, “Who’s birthday is on June 20th? One … Daddy … Two … Mommy … ”

And the kids would respond, “Daddy!” (Actually, they probably said “One” because the technology wasn’t very good at picking up names at the time.)

The problem with this skill is that you needed to include all the birthdays into the skill itself. So I could build a birthday family trivia skill but it would have the birthdays for my family. That’s not a particularly useful skill for other people.

My wife Abigail had a good idea for a skill as well. She said, “It would be really convenient to have a skill for the babysitter to know everything about the house — like bedtimes, WiFi passwords and emergency phone numbers.” But we couldn’t do this either because the program needed to have OUR information inside of it.

Amazon solved a lot of this problem last month with Alexa Blueprints. Alexa Blueprints are a simple and convenient way to create a customized skill that’s just for you. Instead of programming to create the skill, you just type into the web forms and Alexa does the rest.

You Create a Blueprint Just by Filling Out a Form

There’s a number of pretty cool thing is that you can build with Alexa Blueprints. I can easily build my birthday trivia game, Abigail’s babysitter skill and even a Game Show complete with buzzers. My sons and I used the Mother’s Day blueprint to build a card for my wife. It took about 10 minutes and Voila — the Mother’s Day card was done!

Sample text for a 10 minute Alexa Mother’s Day Skill

Take a look at this video to see how you can create your own Alexa blueprint.

Update (10/1/18): I’ve also created another couple of skills for the boys. I’ve used the Flashcards Blueprint to create a vocabulary quiz for my son’s fourth grade class. It’s a great way for him to come up with the definitions for us to put in. Also, we use Whose Turn to decide who’s turn it is to do different activities.