Alexa Skill Development
Why you need to be able to say “We have an Alexa Skill on the Amazon Appstore” in 2018
So we’ve been developing an Amazon Alexa Skill recently to discover the World of benefiting from the Echo devices starting to dominate our homes. Developing a skill with the Alexa is soon to become the new thing to boast about. Having a website was first the thing you needed to look professional as a business, then it was having an app. Now, having a skill on the Alexa app store to show off to your customers.
We get a lot of people asking us for mobile app quotes, not necessarily because they need an app but they realise their customers expect it to retain their integrity and reputation. Having an app is like keeping up appearances and its getting to the point where so many people have one, its no longer giving you a competitve advantage.
So what is the next thing that is going to give you the edge over your competition. We believe it’s having an Alexa Skill to leverage more functionality to your customers giving them more control and insight in to the service you provide them. So if you’re thinking of starting a new business its worth bearing in mind that if you’re competing with the likes the of the existing super businesses like Uber or Just Eat, you’ll need to be prepared to shed out for your alexa skill, as well as your app, your marketing website and your web portal. Almost every app we have built could be massively improved by the use of a simple skill to perform the core action of the business.
Our recent development of an Alexa Skill simply connects to our standard mobile app back-end to tell you how many customers have signed up this year or today. Something incredibly simple but a time saving of approx 1-5 minutes every day by simply uttering a short sentence when you’re eating your dinner as opposed to loading up your website on your phone to login to your web portal and view this information manually.
We’ve also recently invested in some smart switches for home automation to learn about Alexa Skills and understand how controlling these devices remotely can help make life easier, cost less and look more impressive to your friends. We’ve always had the philosephy that if something isn’t easy people won’t use it. I know that leaving lights on at home are a big problem especially with kids. With the introduction of a simple utterance “Alexa, turn off all lights” the problem has gone. So far the brand of switches we have been using is Lanbon and there is some work to be done to make sure that the reliability of these switches is 100% but that is a blog post for another time. It’s about proving the concept and discovering the potential.
We’d love to hear about the ideas you have for building an Alexa Skill. Perhaps we could be your development partner for building your amazing idea. Get in touch to discuss in more detail.
In summary here are some of the reasons why building an Alexa Skill is what you MUST do in 2018!
- Gain a competitive advantage
- Provide accessible functionality of your business to your end users
- Automate processes that are laborious or manually intensive
- Provide insight in to your platforms data
- Show your customers you are innovativing
- Become first to market in a very unsaturated market
- Upsell / monetize functionality
If you can think of any more reasons to start developing your Alexa Skill please let us know and we’ll add it to the list. We are really pleased to be able to add Alexa Skill Development to our services.