Amazon has launched a Developer Console for helping you to create manage and publish Alexa Skills. Available in beta it can be used to create new skills or edit existing ones, although some features are not supported.

Based on feedback from Alexa Skill developers, Amazon has improved the site structure and information architecture of Alexa Skills Kit to to provide a streamlined experience. The new beta console provides the same basic functionality for configuring and managing skills as the old console, but some concepts have been renamed and as yet it lacks support for self-signed certificates for testing and some other features.

As explained in the video overview, the new developer console  organizes skill tasks into build, test, launch, and measure phases, each of which is easily accessible from the top navigation as shown below. You use the left navigation to choose specific steps within each phase and to configure account linking and permissions for your skill.

Improvements highlighted by Paul Cutsinger on the Alexa blog are:

The Build page provides a visual interface for creating intents, slots, sample utterances, and the dialog model. 

• The Test page allows you to interact with your skill using voice or text, and to test single utterances, multi-turn dialogs, and device renderings. These capabilities are a native part of the new console. 
  
  
• Use the Launch page to preview how your skill will appear in the skill store and prepare it for submission. When you are ready to submit, the page displays common validation errors and guides you on what actions to take to resolve the errors before you submit. It also allows you to create and publish private skills for use with Alexa for Business. 
  
  
• You can now navigate to the Measure page directly from the developer console. In addition to statistics on sessions, unique customers, and utterances, it includes new cohort analysis that you can use to visualize customer retention and engagement metrics of your skills over time.

Although there are already hundreds of Alexa Skills, given the dominance of the Echo range of devices in the voice input arena building more skills does seem to be worth the effort so having an improved, streamlined development experience  is to be welcomed.

More Information 

New Alexa Skills Kit Developer Console (Beta) Streamlines Development Process 

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