Report: Amazon Lets Amateurs Publish Custom Alexa Apps to Broad Audiences

From the The Seattle Times:

Amazon is enlisting customers to create voice-controlled games, broadcast lectures and sermons, and turn blogs into audio presentations available to anyone, through its growing universe of Alexa-enabled speaker-and-microphone devices.

The move, rolled out Wednesday, represents a potentially significant advancement for voice-first computing and content creation – akin to the arrival in the mid-1980s of desktop publishing and blogging a decade later – and one that sets Amazon apart from top competitor Google, said observers and users of the technology.

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In April, Amazon unveiled a set of easy-to-use templates for creating content, called Blueprints, allowing Amazon customers with no coding expertise to build Alexa apps for use on devices linked to their own accounts or shared with family and friends. These included templates to build family trivia games or leave customized instructions for a house sitter.

Now, Amazon has expanded that capability to allow customers to publish skills they’ve built with the templates to its Alexa Skill Store in the U.S. for use by anyone with an Alexa-enabled device. In this way, the company aims to add to a growing catalog of more than 80,000 Alexa skills. 

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Filed under: Lecture, News, Patrons and Users, Publishing