Alexa is the virtual assistant by Amazon, it is a voice over service used in Amazon Echo and now in Amazon Echo Show and Echo Spot.
Alexa can perform various operations, which includes, music playback, voice interaction, setting alarms, providing weather, traffic, news, and other various real-time information. It can also control some of the smart devices.
For better experience and personalization, Alexa’s capabilities can be extended by installing Alexa Skills, developed by third-party developers. Skills in Alexa almost work like apps on our mobile devices. But amongst thousands of skills available, creating confusion for us, which of them are the best Alexa skills?
Skills can also be created by individual users, by creating a developer account on blueprints.amazon.com. These skills will be available for other users to install and use.
So today, we will take a look at the guide on how to create Amazon Alexa Skill of your own. Follow the steps given below to create one.
- Go to browser and type blueprints.amazon.com.
- Now, log in to your Amazon account.
- Select the category of skill you would like to create. The categories are, Learning & Knowledge, Storyteller, and At Home.
- In each category, there are various skill templates, select one of the template to create Alexa skill that you want.
Note: For this article, let’s select the Quiz skill from the category Learning & Knowledge.
- Now, tap on the ‘Make Your Own’ button to create Quiz skill. You can also listen to the sample of skill before creating.
Inside the Quiz template, you will see some already published Questions and Answers. If you find the Q & A wrong or incorrect, you can even edit them, and add your own too.
- Now to add some new questions, tap on ‘Add Q&A’ button given at the bottom of the window.
- When you are done adding Questions, click on the ‘Next: Experience’ button, given at the top-right corner of the window.
Now, in this window, you will be able to customize the name of Quiz, the greetings for each player that Alexa will use, responses and even sound effects, which is used to follow a right answer.
- In an introduction to Quiz, type the text in the box to change the voice over of what Alexa will say when Quiz skill is launched by some user. Then below the text box, there is a drop-down menu, with a list of hundreds of sound effects that Alexa can play when the skill is launched. Airplane Takeoff is the default sound effect.
- You can also edit and add the greetings for each player, which will be played by Alexa randomly.
- There is also an option to change the sound effect of what will Alexa say when some player answers the question correctly or incorrectly. And this can be done in case the winner responses as well that means what will Alexa say when some player wins the Quiz.
- Once you are done writing the content for the Quiz skill, press the ‘Next: Name’ button, given at the right-top corner of the window.
In this window, you can change the name of the Quiz skill, by the one which you prefer.
- After all the steps, tap on the ‘Next: Create Skill’ button, to create an Alexa skill of your own.
Note: You are still not there. For this, first you have to create a developer account, which is mandatory for publishing or creating a skill of your own.
Amazon will then create your skill. You will be able to see the green bar, once your skill has been published. This will take few minutes. You can even edit and delete the skill once it is published as indicated in the screenshot given below.
The above steps will guide you to create your own Amazon Alexa skill.
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