When Amazon introduced the Alexa Skill Blueprints last year, it was an opportunity for those who didn’t have any programming skills to create their own Alexa Skills. However, those customized skills were only available for you and your Amazon account so no matter how brilliant you think it was, only your own Alexa devices could use it. Now it looks like Amazon has changed its mind and now allows users to publish them in the Alexa Skills Store, at least for US customers.
Whether you’re an individual, a business, an organization, or a brand you’ll now have the chance to make public the Alexa Skills that you created so that your members, customers, or just the general public who might be interested would be able to use the skill as soon as it’s approved by Amazon. The way to create these skills is through Alexa Skills Blueprints and even if you don’t have any background in programming or even technical skills. It offers a step-by-step process with pre-filled template content that you can customize to your needs.
They are also adding new blueprints that are designed for bloggers, content creators, and organizations. The “Spiritual Talks” blueprint lets you share live and recorded audio while the University skills has the same functionality but is aimed at educational institutions. They also support audio feed URLs and you can add intro and exit messages as well.
There is also now a new Blog blueprint that supports WordPress and will let the blog posts be available so that Alexa can read them out to whoever wants to hear it. If necessary, there are also translations. You can also now create your own flash briefing through a special blueprint that also supports audio feed URLs, live and recorded audio content.
Check out blueprints.amazon.com to see how easy it is to create your skill. You still have the option to make it just for you or to make it public. Amazon will review it first before it goes live. For now, it’s only available in the Alexa Skills Store in the US.
VIA: SlashGear
