Amazon Echo users in India can now choose from over 12,000 skills

Amazon Echo devices and the Alexa skills store made their debut in India on 31st October 2017. Echo, Echo Plus, and Echo Dot are voice-controlled speakers designed entirely around your voice.

Amazon also introduced the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation and code samples, enabling developers around the world to build voice experiences for Alexa customers in India. At launch, Indian users could enjoy close to 11,000 skills offered by global and Indian developers. These include Ted Talks, Saavn, ESPNcricinfo, Ola, Tarla Dalal, Zomato, Freshmenu, Goibibo, and Housejoy among others.

In less than 60 days of the Alexa India skill store going live, Amazon has added more than 1,000 new skills to the store. These new skills bring the total number of skills available for Indian customers to more than 12,000. Because Alexa’s brains are in the AWS cloud, it continually learns and adds more functionality, every hour, every day.

Echo devices connect to Alexa-a cloud-based voice service-to play music, set alarms and timers, provide information, check your calendar, weather, sports scores, manage to-do and shopping lists, control smart home devices, and more – instantly. These experiences are made possible with Skills, that add new capabilities that create a more personalised experience with your Amazon Echo device.

To find a skill and enable, go to the skills section in the Alexa app browse for skills and then click enable. If you know the skill name, then you can just ask Alexa to enable the skill. To enable Ola, just say “Alexa, enable Ola.” The Alexa companion app can be downloaded from Google Play and Apple App Store. You can also access Alexa Skills store on from your desktop browser.

Through ASK, developers, companies, and hobbyists can integrate Alexa into their products and services, and build new skills for Alexa. You don’t need to have a background in natural language understanding or speech recognition to build great voice experiences for your products with Alexa.