Alexa is Amazon’s voice assistant, powering hundreds of millions of devices and smart speakers like the Amazon Echo family.

Brands can create a personalised experience on Alexa by building “Skills”, which are essentially voice-driven apps, allowing Amazon Alexa to connect to hardware and software in order to perform a certain task. Similar to Google Actions, the tasks that these Skills can perform vary from simple things like playing music, to more complex interactions such as story-telling with multiple choice endings. However, the thing all Skills have in common is that they are driven by voice commands.

Our team of voice architects and developers work together with our clients to define, develop and support Alexa skills. We can help you at any or all stages, starting with ideation use case workshops, through to conversational design, voice app development and ongoing analytics and optimisation. In addition, we can use the wider specialties within TIPi Group to create and execute a promotion strategy once your Skill is live.

Our approach to building Alexa skills

To help you understand what a typical project looks like we’ve split down our process into five steps.

Workshop and creating a use case for voice

You may already have an existing idea for an Alexa Skill, the team can flesh out the technical and content requirements to create a scope of work. If not, we run workshops to create new use cases for Alexa Skills. These interactive sessions educate your team on all things voice and create ideas for Alexa skills. We are able to vet any ideas and develop out the top ideas into a detailed scope of work.

Alexa Skill design

Designing the Alexa Skill the first stage of the project. We start with pen and paper to flesh out the happy path and then over to design tools such as Botmock to develop working designs. Having launched over a dozen skills already the team are able to use experience from previous projects to avoid and design pitfalls.

Alexa Skill Development

Once designs have been signed off development work is able to commence. We pick the best framework for development on a per project basis. We have experience developing with Jovo, Litexa and the ASK SDKs for Node.js.

Depending on the features of the skill we use the AWS stack to host the Skill and any associated content. Be that audio and image files in S3 buckets to content and user data in dynamoDB. We have experience of deploying custom features such as account linking, reminders API, InSkill Purchasing (ISP), Alexa Presentation Language (APL) into skills along with connected to your own external APIs and services.

Alexa Skill Testing

Once your Alexa Skill has be developed we move onto testing and rounds of amends. All skills are tested internally using internal tooling to test common voice requests. Shared access is then given for external testing, errors and improvements are recording during this process and then fixed.

Alexa Skill Submission

All ready to go…just the submission. The team can guide you through this process creating all content and assets for the submission.

Above is typical implementation however we are flexible in approaches to projects. This includes creating prototypes, training and developing with internal development teams.