Developing an Alexa Skill can be the Smarter Way of Doing Business

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the key driving factors for the success of businesses across all industries. With increasing adoption of AI today, companies are now looking for more innovative and smarter ways of doing work.

Alexa, the virtual assistant developed by Amazon, could be the answer. This smart assistant isn’t meant solely for intelligent homes, and as a matter of fact, such assistants have already started to pave their way into the business world.

Financial force, for instance, recently showcased how it could bank on Amazon Echo—a hands-free speaker that connects to Alexa voice service—to fetch business documents including expense reports with just a few voice commands. A number of companies are now intrigued by this concept of command-powered offices.

In order to engage voice apps across a variety of categories, Amazon offers compensations for top-performing developers. The compensation program that began by paying out for high-quality games has now expanded its reach to education, food and beverages, lifestyle, health and fitness, music, and productivity. Although Amazon doesn’t precisely define what it means, engaging might indicate the implementation of distinctive ‘voice-first’ apps that have the Alexa skill while featuring fresh content.

Developing an Alexa skill can be learned with the help of tutorials including the Alexa Skills Set that has all the APIs in addition to coding tools, documentation, and various other resources required to get started. AWS Lambda, built on the Amazon Web Services platform, is another resource that developers can consider exploring. It is a cloud service that enables developers to run a code at minimal cost, without requiring them to provision or manage servers.

Once organizations have mastered the skill, there are a lot of potential uses for Alexa in businesses. For instance, items can be added to the Google Calendar with the help of Quick Events, while Chat Bot for Slack can be used to post messages to Slack via voice. Furthermore, Completer Tasks functions with the Complete mobile app and provides faster ways of adding tasks. Although these cases aren’t significantly impactful, Alexa will develop more effective capabilities for companies’ databases in addition to more advanced APIs.