Alexa Skills Development: Uses, Benefits, and Applications

The Voice assistants are becoming the new companions for human civilization! From making mundane calls to waking you up in the morning, a voice assistance integrated device can help you in multiple aspects. Nowadays assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistants are used by people all over the world rigorously. To help you understand the hype and how it can help your product engage with the target audience better, we will look into Alexa skill development and integration.

Alexa skills are functions and application that helps your users to access your apps, products, and services by using the Alexa voice assistant. You might think about how this would help your business to thrive?

Well, imagine the chances of conversion rate enhancement if users were able to order food from a restaurant app just by saying the name of the dish instead of browsing for hours. Definitely, it would make interaction a breezy process and would help businesses avoid turnover.

If achieving this aligns with your business expansion goals, stay tuned! We will help you to understand how Alexa Skills development can help you achieve this by explaining the development process, benefits, and its uses.

Alexa Skills: A basic introduction

Alexa is a voice assistant service managed and developed by Amazon. Every echo device has Alexa attached to it, which makes navigating through shopping, playing music, and finding product information an easy and efficient process.

For this, the Alexa voice assistant uses Alexa skills. It helps Alexa to understand users’ commands and respond accordingly.

Behind The Scenes Of Alexa Skill Working

Although finding your speaker understands you better than your neighbors is weird, rest assured it is not some weird occult! Alexa Skill works on a concrete architecture that makes it capable of understanding voice commands and interacting with users.

Let’s understand this with a simple example of asking Alexa integrated device to wake you up:

Let’s say you want to set the alarm for 7 in the morning. You will begin by saying “Alexa, wake me up at 7 in the morning” now your voice command will set a trigger to Alexa Skill (think of it as an app) that sets alarm. Once, the right skill is triggered it will now call a lambda function which will set an alarm and will wake you up at 7 in the morning.

Can I make Alexa Skills For My Business App?

Glad you asked! Yes, you can make Alexa skills to complement your digital solutions and enhance its navigation. For this, Amazon provides Alexa Skill Kit, you can hire a digital agency like ours proficient in crafting Alexa Skills and share your vision with them. Although the development cost and time differ from one agency to another, it majorly depends on the complexity and the size of your project.

The Alexa Skills Development Process:

To plan Alexa skill functionality and implement them successfully, understanding what happens during the process of Alexa Skill development is a must. As it will help you to get an in-depth insight into the whole process. Here’s a stepwise blueprint of the Alexa skill development process to help you get a better idea:

1. Before starting the development of Alexa skills, the development team will first analyze your digital solution and find the scope for Alexa skill integration.
2. Once the aspects where Alexa skills can make a difference are cleared via discussion, they will start the development process.
3. During the development process, the development team will use Alexa Skill Kit. Alexa Skill Kit is basically a tool kit crafted for helping developers to develop Alexa Skills. It contains APIs and tools to facilitate the development process.
4. Once the development process is completed, the team will also test the efficiency of Alexa Skill and will ask for your input as well. After complete satisfaction with the finished products, the developers will then proceed to the deployment phase.
5. In this, the Alexa skills will be deployed to your live app and it will become available for everyone to use. For a certain period of time, our agency also provides maintenance support to help you get used to working with Alexa Skills

Benefits Of Using Alexa Skills

Getting started with the Alexa Skill development process would need you to invest a considerable amount of time and money. Hence, to ensure that this investment yields a favorable result for your business you must ensure that the benefits offered by Alexa skills align with your current business needs. Furthermore, by knowing the perks of Alexa skill development, you can track how useful the development process is for your business help. Here’s a list of benefits of the Alexa Skill development process for your business:

Better Interaction: With the help of Alexa Skills integration, your app and its functionalities will become more accessible for the users. In the long run, it would mean that your users won’t have to reach out to the app to access its functionalities. They can simply achieve that by using voice commands, which will enhance the user’s experience exponentially.

Stand Ahead of the curb: With Alexa skills integration your app will have a competitive advantage. As your business will be able to sport a unique functionality that enhances accessibility and makes the navigation process more interactive. This will help your brand to make a unique identity as well which will serve well in drawing more potential users.

Scope of functionality enhancement: The Alexa Skill Kit consistently comes with new upgrades and features. Hence, your business application will have a wider scope of growth and functionality enhancement with the help of the Alexa Skill development process. This in the long run would help your business to stay up to date and cater to the evolving user requirements.

Market Recognition: Integration of Alexa Skills is slowly picking up the pace and investors have recently started singing its praise. By getting started with Alexa Skills early, your brand will get better recognized as progressive and innovative. This, in the long run, can help you to ensure that you have positive coverage in the media about your services.

Vast Market: Alexa is being used by a majority of devices as a voice assistant. With Alexa skill integration, you will be able to tap into its vast market and user base with ease. It eventually signifies better outreach and a higher probability of having conversions.

Alexa Skills Use Cases

Lastly, whether you own an eStore or a healthcare app, Alexa skills have the potential to help you thrive in almost any of the industries. As it can help users with a wider set of functionalities to make almost any lifestyle-related task easier and more efficient. Hence, the scope of improvisation using Alexa skills holds true for a variety of business niches. Here are some of the different industries where Alexa skill development can offer a better user experience:

1. eCommerce: For eCommerce apps, Alexa skills integration can be a huge help. As it will help users to make faster purchases, secure payments, and track their orders efficiently. In the long run, this will result in faster navigation which can be a great aid for accessing higher conversions and sales.
2. Healthcare: For healthcare services, Alexa skills will make accessibility much easier. By integrating it with your healthcare application your users can easily book their consultations, get reminders about appointments, and order medicines as well for themselves. Hence, we can say that for healthcare services Alexa skills can make taking care of every user’s individual needs easier.
3. Hospitality: If you own a hospitality-related business, then Alexa skills would help you process services such as booking, cancellation, and payments instantaneously. Hence, your users will be able to enjoy the one-of-a-kind services without getting confused about the complicated manual reservation procedures.
4. Finance & Insurance: For finance and insurance companies, Alexa skills development and integration can become a great asset. It would make requesting and paying installments easier for users. Further, your app will be able to send better and more effective repayment reminders to the users. As a result, your finance app would enhance the user’s experience and help you access greater profits without any hassles.

To Wrap Up

Alexa skills can help you take your services to the next level. It will make interaction with your app and access to your service easier for your buyers. In the long run, this can open up the gateways for better profits and sales for your business. However, before embarking on the journey of Alexa Skill integration you need to do an in-depth analysis of how it can help your app to thrive. Doing so will help your business to find a wider scope of expansion and profits.

To get further assistance and discuss the right pathway for Alexa skills integration, you can take help from experienced developers as well. If you have an Alexa skill idea and want to get started with its integration right away, do reach out to us today. Our developers at Terasol Technologies have successfully helped businesses in implementing Alexa skills and thriving online efficiently.