Alexa Skills Kit

[jonjanisch]

Awesome! I'm going to dive in after work!

https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit

I wonder how this differs from the beta SDK or if this supersede it.

[sidynele]

And another huge announcement - Alexa Voice Service

Introducing the Alexa Voice Service (AVS)

If you’re a hardware maker and your connected device has a microphone and a speaker, the new Alexa Voice Service (AVS) gives you the ability to add voice-powered experiences to your connected devices. Your customers can simply speak to Alexa through the microphone on your device and Alexa will respond through your device's speakers. This gives your customers access to Alexa’s skills and capabilities, including both built-in skills and those created by your or other developers using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). Examples of Alexa skills include the ability to answer general knowledge questions, provide weather forecasts, query Wikipedia and much more.

For example, if your device is a connected alarm clock, your customers can ask your alarm clock 'what's the weather?' or 'how's traffic?' using Alexa's built-in skills. In addition, you could use the Alexa Skills Kit to teach Alexa the new skill of setting your alarm. It’s simple, and you don’t need to have prior experience with speech recognition or Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

Take Advantage of the Alexa Voice Service

It’s straightforward and free to add Alexa to your device using the Alexa Voice Service. Use AVS to extend your hardware’s capabilities and interact with your customers in new ways. Benefits of AVS include:

Create Frictionless Interfaces for Your Customers. Allow your customers to control your device in more intuitive ways with a natural language voice interface. By integrating AVS with your device, your customer no longer needs to get out their phone, find an app, and use their thumbs to invoke a command. All they have to do is ask via the microphone on your device.
Scale Quickly in the Cloud. AVS is cloud based and scales as your needs scale. You don’t need to worry about provisioning hardware and managing infrastructure to power your voice experience.
Integrate Easily. No experience with voice recognition or Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is required. Using AVS, add Alexa to your device in just a few hours. Leave understanding human speech to us and focus on your differentiated value add to customers.
Build for Free. Using AVS to power speech experiences on your devices is completely free.
Want to add Alexa to your device or service? Sign up and we will email you when AVS becomes available.