If you want to customize your Amazon Echo experience, there is no better way than with skills. Obviously, you can ask Alexa to do various different things like give you updates on the weather or wake you up at a certain time, but you can do more than that thanks to some of the best Alexa skills out there. Skills are third-party add-ons to your Echo that add more functionality to your smart speaker. With Alexa Skill Blueprints, it’s really easy to create your own Amazon Alexa skill without the need for any development experience.
How to Create an Amazon Alexa Skill Using Blueprints
Creating an Amazon Alexa Skill with Blueprints is easy, as all it takes is to start from the Blueprint in Amazon Charts Site. Pay attention to the logo at the top as shown in the screenshot above, if your Amazon account is located outside the US, go to the Amazon Blueprints site for your country. You also need to make sure you’re signed in to the account connected to your Echo, and you can then choose from a lot of different schemes to get started. You can create stories, greeting cards, trivia games, or even just set up custom responses to questions you might ask Alexa at a later time. We’ll start by creating a custom Q&A skill.
Step 1: Choose your skill
In this case, we chose the “Custom Questions and Answers” skill. You can read how it works, and even play a sample to hear a sample question and answer sample. We’ll do this so that when we ask Alexa what the best tech site is, she answers that XDA-Developers is. Click Make Your Own to get started.
Second Step: Add your question
The next step is to add your question so Alexa can understand what you want to ask. You should also add additional ways to ask the same question, as when we think about language and speaking, you may not necessarily speak the same way all the time. “What is the best tech website” and “What is the best tech website” are two different ways of saying the same thing, but without adding an additional website, Alexa will only understand one of them in the context of this specific skill we created.
You can also add other questions in the same list, so if you have other questions that you think are appropriate for your skill, now is the time to do so. You can have Alexa answer anything you want, anything you ask for, so think outside the box!
Step Three: Wait
You will now need to wait for Amazon to process your skills and save them to your account, although this only takes a few minutes. If you did not have an Amazon Developer Portal account previously, you will be prompted to create one here. Simply click on Update Account and you are ready to go. The page above will refresh to say “Your skill is ready to use and edit” when it’s ready to go.
Step 4: Test your new skill!
You can now test your new skill, and everything is going well, it should work perfectly! We’ve included an audio clip of our skills we’ve created to work below.
Other skills you can do
There are so many skills you can configure and try out, and that’s just scratching the surface. If you’re particularly proud of the skill you’ve created, you can post it on the Alexa Skill Store
If you want to get your hands dirty and actually develop your own skills (instead of just using Blueprints), you can do so by Following the company’s developer documentation. There are a lot of programming languages it supports, so be sure to check them out to learn more.
The beauty of Alexa skills is that there are thousands of them. You can easily search for it on the Alexa app, or head to alexa.amazon.com Browse a selection of categories. To test your skills you will need an Alexa-enabled device. We recommend choosing the Amazon Echo Dot (4th generation) because it is a wallet-friendly option with all the key features you need. Be sure to read our Echo Dot (4th generation) speaker review to learn more about it.
Almost all full-size Amazon Echo features are complemented by Skill support for a more wallet-friendly price.
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