Tutorial : Building an Alexa Skill for Amazon Echo
The Amazon Echo device is in my opinion, an exciting breakthrough for digital personal assistants. In addition to the built-in voice commands that it can execute, Amazon has also built out an entire ecosystem around it.
A key part of that ecosystem is to for third-party developers to build and publish their custom Alexa Skills. There is an Alexa marketplace, just like the mobile app marketplaces (Google Play and Apple iTunes) that we know of. This gives a great platform for Voice Assisted Skills to be delivered on the Amazon Echo device.
If you are looking out for help as a developer to write your first Alexa Skill, I wrote a step-by-step tutorial for building out an Alexa Skill for the Amazon Echo device. The tutorial was published on ProgrammableWeb.
Note that you do not need to own an Amazon Echo device to write and test out an Alexa skill. Amazon has made available simulators via which you can test out the skill.
So go ahead and build out your first Alexa skill today.
