My First Alexa Skill

Coming from a web developer background (PHP to be specific) it was a bit confusing about where to start and what to build. Especially when you are first time using Alexa itself.

It was mid 2020 the whole world was facing this pandemic, every day looking into https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus and https://www.covid19india.org and guessing what will be the next step towards my coding and jobs working remotely.

One thing I learned is that only one skill set is not enough in the long run for sure. So I decided to look outside of web development and do something productive and real. But I didn't want to learn any new programming language or framework. From here I take this decision to explore this Alexa.

To be frank I didn't know anything about this Alexa before buying my first-ever Echo Dot. I was so excited when it arrived. After connecting it to my mobile internet my first question to Alexa was “What are the time?” it responded and the next moment I decided to build something which can run into Alexa.

A big question to myself was what should I build in Alexa? And from here my first-ever custom Alexa skill journey begins. I have started searching YouTube, Alexa's official page, articles etc.

Almost 2 months after buying my Alexa I have finally decided what to build. Believe me, this was the toughest part to decide what to build because there are a lot more options available and it is quite hard to start with something user specific or personal. So I decided to build a custom Alexa skill for my current company. The idea was very simple: if a user asks about my company it will respond and respond with multiple utterances. It's like people will also find my company over Alexa instead of google.

Prerequisite :

You have basic knowledge of NodeJs or python as currently, Alexa supports only these two scripting languages. By the way, you can choose any language to build your skill through API as it is supported by Alexa.

Publish your skills:

After completing the development of your custom skill you have to submit it for review to get certification from amazon. After passing the review your Alexa skill is automatically posted to the amazon e-commerce platform by default and from there, anyone can enable it in their Echo Dot.

References :

Dabblab YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@dabblelab

Alexa Skill - Telegram: https://t.me/alexa_skills (there are lots of other good channels available also)

And of course Alexa's official page https://developer.amazon.com/en-IN/alexa