Skills of the Month — March 2018
Every month, we select the most exciting Alexa skills built on Storyline and share their story.
By doing this, we help skills creators find ideas and inspiration for building Alexa skills, along with making their skills more discoverable.
Last month, the highlighted skills were:
- Freeze Dancers, by Adva Levin;
- My African Safari, by Yancey Grantham (we actually wrote a whole interview with the creator of this one);
- Soccer Drills, by Nicholas Bailey;
- Mindfulness Sounds, by Drew Blanke.
You can read more about them here:
Baby Lullaby, by Adva Levin
Baby Lullaby Alexa Skill produces a soothing sound for babies that helps them fall asleep.
When you open the skill, you can listen to the intro and say “goodnight” to hear the music play. You can also say stop if you managed to stay awake and you’d like for it to stop.
I think this skill is a perfect example of how you should think about Alexa.
It has:
- A fantastic invocation name, which is easy to memorize;
- A really good and, most importantly, repetitive use case.
And here’s the best part. It’s really easy to design a skill like this. Here’s an example of how a skill similar to this one, Yoga Sounds, looks like in Storyline:
The major part of the skill is the blue Audio Player block, which streams the audio file with the sound on Alexa. It also has a Stop Block, which activates when the user says stop, and a Help Block, which triggers if the user says help.
You can see for yourself how it looks in Storyline here:
Healthy Habits, by Digital Pratik
Healthy Habits Alexa Skill gives you one good healthy habit a day. Lightweight by design, it has such a unique and well-chosen use case for Alexa that it was able to reach 3,492 users as of today.
It also uses a trick I described in this blog post to attract more 5-star reviews from its users. In short, the trick is very simple:
For every five 5-star reviews the creator of the skills adds some new content.
This motivates both the users of the skill to leave high-quality ratings and the creator to add more content once they hit another milestone. Basically, user feedback = more content in the skill. It works so well that the skill was able to reach thirty one 5-star reviews in the Alexa Skills Store.
More than that, once Pratik saw the success of the skill, he released four similar Alexa skills with just another type of content:
As a result, Alexa skills built by Digital Pratik now reach more than 20,000 users and have over 100 reviews total.
As you can see from this example, it’s not about putting all your efforts to launch one Alexa Skill. It’s about trial and error, and also an ability to learn from your mistakes and successes.
Healthy Habits Alexa Skill is also very simple by design. Here’s an example of how a skill similar to this one, Daily Life Hack, looks like in Storyline:
The major part of the skill is the Welcome Block, which provides a user with an intro audio effect and two messages about what the skill does. Then it goes to the life hacks API request (see that dotted line from “break time” step?) and grabs a random life hack from a spreadsheet with two hundred life hacks.
After that, Alexa says the {{lifehack}} to the user and gives them a last message — simple reminder to check out the skill again.
You can see how it looks in Storyline (and even play with it) here:
Forest Survival, by Lawrence McCray
Forest Survival Alexa Skill is a “choose your own adventure” style game that takes you deep into a dark forest.
The thing that I like about this skill the most is that it uses a very simple and easy-to-remember invocation name. Also, the experience is designed really well, with lots of audio effects and SSML.
You can find a preview of a similar interactive story skill our last article with Skills of the Month for February:
Thanks for reading! 🙌
Have questions about the product? Feel free to ask them in our community.
Best, Storyline team.
