Amazon New Lets You Add Alexa Skills By Voice

Alexa is the digital assistant that powers Amazon’s Echo devices as well as some other devices. Its capabilities are referred to as “Skills,” it has many of them, and previously users needed to open an app and browse through countless Skills in order to find and add the one they wanted to Alexa. Starting today, Amazon is making the entire process very easy by enabling users to add Alexa Skills using voice only.

This is part of a makeover that Amazon has announced today for the Skills “app store,” they are now neatly sorted into categories like Lifestyle and Smart Home. Users can easily browse through the categories to find the Skills they like.

Alexa Skills homepage now features collections of Skills, making it easy for users to discover new ones and see which are famous among other users. The search feature for Skills has also been improved, results can now be filtered by rating and relevance.

The biggest improvement is the ability to adds Skills to Alexa using voice commands. Instead of going through the app and manually adding it, simply say “Alexa, enable…” followed by the name of the Skill and the voice assistant will take care of the rest.

Amazon mentions in its press release that there are more than 1,400 Skills available for Alexa and the list includes Honeywell and Lyft, both of which have been added today.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Gadgets
Tags: Alexa, Amazon Echo