Students publish over 1500 Alexa Skills with Alexa Student Influencer Programme

Amazon designed the Alexa Student Influencer (ASI) program with a goal to evangelize Alexa Skills and educate fellow student developers to build Skills for Alexa. Through this program, Amazon has educated over 2200 student developers through 40+ workshops across 20 campuses in India. The student community influenced through the program has already published around 1500 Skills on the Alexa Skills store in India. To expand the ASI programme, Amazon is working across campuses to offer candidates an opportunity to earn an internship opportunity.

Amazon is also collaborating with multiple stakeholders to enable the voice ecosystem. Through various student programmes and brand initiatives, Amazon is enabling these stakeholders to publish voice Skills for Alexa. 

In mid-2019, Amazon also introduced its Alexa Developer Rewards program in India. The program enables developers to earn money for creating engaging Alexa Skills. Developers can earn money for eligible Skills that garner some of the highest customer engagement in the India Alexa Skills Store. Alexa Skills that provide engaging experiences to users have a higher rate of earning the reward every month. The Alexa Developer Rewards builds upon the Alexa Developer Incentive Program, which offers Alexa Skills developers rotating perks like devices and swag. The number of developers earning rewards by building Alexa skills has grown 1.5x times in one year.  

Agrahyah Technologies, India’s first voice agency based in Mumbai started in 2017, the same year as Alexa’s India launch. With many successful skills launches including Red Chillies Entertainment  for the movie Zero, Agrahyah’s Skills today are among the top rated Skills on Amazon Alexa Skills store in India.

Like Agrahyah, there are thousands of developers, agencies and brands currently developing Alexa Skills for customers in India and international markets. Amazon is working with thousands of third-party developers, agencies and device makers to provide necessary services and tools for engaging users for Alexa. The Alexa Skills Kit provides necessary tools for developers to extend Alexa’s functionalities to their Skills. Building Skills for Alexa is free and developers can get a prototype Skill going live within a few hours! 

With Alexa, students, developers, agencies and brands can build engaging Skills and reach new customers. Amazon offers a collection of self-service APIs, tools, documentation, and code samples that make it fast and easy for developers to add Skills to Alexa. Developers can leverage Amazon’s knowledge and pioneering work in the field of voice design, and just focus on developing a Skill for their customers and build their businesses.