Amazon has introduced Alexa Skill Blueprints, a way for any Alexa owner to create personalized skills and responses for Alexa without any need for programming. This  could prove to be a real breakthrough to making Alexa a useful asset in the home.

The idea of Skill Blueprints is simple enough - you enter your own information and customize the experience that accompanies Alexa's response based on it. 

What you will find provided at Alexa Skill Blueprints is easy-to-use templates that allow anyone can create customized experiences for Alexa within minutes just by filling in the blanks. Instead of the skill being uploaded to the Alexa Skills store it is only available on the Alexa devices registered to your Amazon account.

In his blog post, Steve Rabuchin, Vice President, Amazon Alexa, wrote:

“Alexa Skill Blueprints is an entirely new way for you to teach Alexa personalized skills just for you and your family. You don’t need experience building skills or coding to get started—my family created our own jokes skill in a matter of minutes, and it’s been a blast to interact with Alexa in a totally new and personal way.”

There are three easy steps to creating a personalized skill:

1. Select your blueprint template by visiting the Alexa Skill Blueprints website: blueprints.amazon.com. There are more than 20 to chose from in four categories: Fun & Games, At Home, Storyteller, and Learning & Knowledge where you can create customized tests as well as lists of interesting facts.
   
   
2.  Each blueprint comes with pre-filled content that can be used or customized by typing in your own questions and responses - both answers and reactions.
   
   
3. With just one click your skill will be available on all Alexa-enabled devices associated with your Amazon account.

Alexa comes with an in-built ability to tell jokes and there are plenty of trivia quizzes in the Alexa Skill Store - so why provide blueprints to proliferate more. The answer of course is personalization - the need to have an Alexa that shares your family's memories and sense of humor, any can respond appropriately to different individuals. To do this it takes advantage of the Your Voice by Amazon feature rolled out in November 2017, which makes it possible to create up to 10 distinguished voice profiles, enabling Alexa to personalize its responses for everyone in the home.

Blueprints for babysitter, petsitter and house guest can provide helpful information for people coming into your home - all they need to do is, for example “Alexa, open My Parrot Sitter,” and then Alexa will answer suitable questions such as "where is the bird food".

If successful Alexa Blueprints could give Amazon a major advantage in maintaining its current market-leading position in the voice assistant space. Amazon not only wants more Alexa owners, it wants those owners to purchase more Echo devices and having an Alexa who can help the baby sitter find diapers or a house guest to know which drawer the bottle opener is kept in could encourage placing more Echo Dot or Spots around the home.

We have previously discussed the problem of the low takeup of Alexa skills - while Alexa has access to more than 30,000 skills, about 53% of consumers use only one to three of them, while 14% of consumers haven't even enabled one. But the ability to create your own skills could change this. If the skill you want isn't available by customizing one of the available blueprints you might search through 3rd party skills on offer.

More Information 

Alexa Skill Blueprints

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