Alexa

If a voice platform shall be successful, it needs to offer its users a large choice of voice apps. All users shall be able to customize their Alexa experience with the particular Skills they need. The platform provider cannot possibly

Alexa is not a monolithic app delivered by Amazon, but rather an ecosystem of highly specialized voice apps (or Skills) that are all available on the Alexa platform. There are clear roles for software providers, hardware providers and Amazon as

In part 4 of this series on Alexa Account Linking we call the protected API of the linked account. If the API requires a user context, it should be connected via account linking and OAuth. After the user has linked

In part 3 of this series, we describe how a Skill using account linking can get an access token in the Skill Service. Havin the access token is a prerequisite for calling an API. First, if no access token is

We need to configure the account linking parameters on the Skill Interface. In this configuration page, we switch on the account linking feature for our Skill. We can configure our Skill to enforce account linking, i.e., the user has to

Before anything else, the Skill developer needs to register the Alexa Skill as an “App” with the API provider (Spotify). Typically, there is a section on the developer portal of the API provider, as it is with Spotify. Here, a

We can personalize Alexa Skills by accessing our own APIs or the APIs of third parties from within our Alexa Skill. This allows us to have the customer’s data available in our Skill. For example, if we create a music

An Alexa Skill is made up of two components: the Skill Interface and the Skill Service. What is the difference and which component shall solve which task? A Skill Interface is a descriptor, that defines trigger points, so-called intents, in

Just as in the early days of mobile, when fortunes were made with mobile apps on the app store, it is now the perfect time to catch the opportunities offered by voice apps, so-called Skills. Often, the Alexa architecture is