101 Alexa, introduce.
Alexa, who are you?
Alexa is Amazon’s virtual assistant, which can provide you information and service via voice commands. Amazon has a Alexa Skill store that offers you a wide range of Alexa Skills, from games to productivity tools.
This is how Alexa describes herself.
“I’m Alexa and I’m designed around your voice. I can provide information, music, news, weather and more.”
Alexa, why are you here?
In the past decade, we benefit a lot from the digital evolution. Meantime, have you realised the digital evolution actually leads to human devolution in some ways? This picture explains.
The era of voice control will possibly be a real evolution that moves us back on track. On one hand, we are free to move (hurray!). You no longer have a retina display that will petrify you, but an assistant who will always be around to help. On the other hand, we can finish a task easier and quicker. Instead of moving our fingers around, all we need is to say a sentence. In fact, tasks requiring more than 3 steps would be a good candidate for an Alexa Skill.
So why would we need a digital assistant like Alexa? To welcome a real evolution.
Alexa, what do you want?
Having been with Alexa for a year, I noticed a pattern of a good Alexa Skills: Less is More.
Unless your Skill aims at challenging user’s bottom line of patience, the Skill should be straight forward in providing what user asked for. For example, if user asks for the temperature, you’d better skip the wind speed or tide level that user does not care.
Besides, unlike mobile Apps or websites, Alexa Skills is voice-oriented. To achieve nice User Experience, remember the following:
- No robot
- No BS
I believe majority of human beings don’t like talking to robots and BS.
Alexa, how can I start?
Follow this publication! There will be more stories later about my journey to Alexa.
However, if you cannot wait, you can also visit Alexa Developer site. It has some Get Started Tutorials which walk you through the development, submission and certification.
Last but not least, you will need a AWS account to start with. If you haven’t, create one here!
