Make your own skills – no coding required
Amazon has unveiled skill Alexa Blueprints in the UK, enabling Blighty-bound Echo users to create their own skills. The feature has been available in the US for the best part of 2018, and now it’s getting a wider roll-out.
Skill Blueprints enable users to use templates to create skills for their home. There are 22 pre-set skills that can be customised – and the great news is that no coding is required. Just log onto blueprints.amazon.co.uk to start creating skills and editing the Blueprints, and anything you save will be available on your Echo speaker in a couple of minutes.
Essential reading: How to use Blueprints to create your own Alexa skills
The skill templates include trivia quizzes, revision tests (think your child’s spelling tests), information requests for visitors (“what’s the Wi-Fi password?”), babysitters or pet sitters, creating and maintaining chore rotas for your household and even making up your own fairy tales.
These can be customised using the editor, where you can type in questions or requests for Alexa and the responses. Each one can be fine-tuned by adding pauses and emphasis – and you can get quite creative with the editor – making your skill as detailed as you need.
It’s a fun feature to try out and some households will definitely find uses – but it points to an exciting future where we can get a little more control of our smart homes by editing skills without coding. Until then, fairy tale writing it is.
