Skills of the Month — April 2018
Every month, we select the most exciting Alexa skills built on Storyline and share the story behind them.
We hope it helps skills developers find new ideas for building Alexa skills. Also, it makes their skills more discoverable (Yancey Grantham has seen a spike of 600 people in his Alexa skill My African Safari when we shared his story).
Last month, the highlighted skills were:
- Baby Lullaby, by Adva Levin;
- Healthy Habits, by Digital Pratik;
- Forest Survival, by Lawrence McCray;
You can read more about them here:
Inspirational Quotes, by Digital Pratik
Inspirational Quotes Alexa skill delivers a fresh inspirational quote on a daily basis.
You know what I really like about this Alexa skill? The invocation name. It perfectly describes the skill’s content and you can figure out what the skill does without even launching it.
The use case of this Alexa skill is really good too:
- It’s repetitive (e.g. people like to hear motivational stuff on a daily basis);
- The content itself is helpful and interesting;
Those two things lead directly to the stats that this Alexa skill was able to achieve:
Inspirational Quotes Alexa skill has 2478 users and 4579 sessions so far — it’s really not bad for a skill you can build in five minutes.
Here’s how it looks in Storyline:
You can build an Alexa skill similar to this one in ten minutes. Pick a content you want to start from, put it in a Google Spreadsheet, and follow our guide on how to integrate Google Sheets with Storyline to create Alexa skills that are easy to update.
Here’s an interactive preview of the skill so you can test it right in the browser:
Radio U1 Tirol, by von studiopiu-consulting
Radio U1 Tirol Alexa skill streams a U1 Tirol radio station right to your Alexa device (available in Germany only at the moment).
I really like this skill because of two things:
- Streaming music is the #1 use case for Alexa at the moment;
- It uses our Radio template we introduced a couple of weeks ago (read more about templates here);
It’s been able to get over a hundred users in a week and growing. And it’s not that complex too: it uses an Audio Player block to grab a live stream and launch it on Alexa, and a few user replies that lead to that block.
The 80’s Arcade, by Trap
The 80’s Arcade Alexa skill takes you into the year of 1989. Your older brother Chad is dropping you off at the new arcade in town. He’ll be back in one hour. You’ve got ten bucks burning a hole in your stone-washed jeans. Put on your parachute pants and get lost-in-time in this collection of awesome 80's-style games. Card Sharks. Survey Says. Island Survivor. Name That Tune. Tubular Trivia.
The thing that I like about this skill is that it’s all done with different voice that makes it sound really interesting.
It also has a few interesting storylines that you can go through — and more storylines are coming soon.
This interactive story has about 30 people playing it daily and growing.
Pickup Lines, by Gaurav Bathija
Pickup Lines Alexa skill tells people funny and witty pickup lines.
It also uses our Google Sheet integration and has 150+ pickup lines available at the moment.
The use case is really good too because pickup lines is not a unique experience that people do once or twice. Most folks check out websites with pickup lines every Friday night, so this Alexa skill should make it easier.
Here’s how Pickup Lines Alexa skill looks in Storyline:
EXCLUSIVE: Storyline Manual, by Bill Mccarthy
A week ago Bill announced the release of the Storyline Manual Alexa skill.
In his own words:
“Storyline Manual is for those people who enjoy using Alexa, that also have ideas for using her, that just don’t seem to exist, yet! You’re an idea person, but you don’t know anything about computer programming. A friend probably told you that it’s easy to write Alexa skills. So, you checked into it and got lost in a tangle of intents, invocations, slots and utterances. For you, Greek is easier to understand than Lambda or node.js!
Alexa will guide you through the use of Storyline’s online app and help you make your own skills. Ten minutes! That’s how long it will take you to create your first Alexa skill. With Storyline, you can create it, and test it, in your browser. You can go from concept to completion without programming.”
This is the best product manual I’ve ever seen. Here’s how it looks in Storyline:
Alexa teaches you how to create skills for Alexa. Isn’t that cool?!
Thanks for reading! 🙌
Have questions about the product? Feel free to ask them in our community.
Best, Storyline team.
