Introduction

In this tutorial, we will be looking at Amazon’s Developer Console. Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a feature provided by Alexa, also enables developers to create their own custom Alexa Skills. So the developer console provides us with an interface to create our own skills efficiently.

If you’re completely new to Alexa and its features, click here to know about it in detail

Creating an account

The first step to accessing the developer console is creating an account on Amazon.

Firstly, you need to go to the Amazon Developer homepage. You can visit it by clicking here.

Next, click on the Amazon Alexa option on the webpage.

Next, click on the Alexa Skills Kit option within the Products drop-down menu.

Subsequently, click on the Console option.

Next, you will be asked to sign in to your Amazon account. If you don’t have an account, create one by clicking the Create your Amazon account option.

Subsequently, we will navigate to the Skill Developer Console by clicking on Alexa Skills Kit option.

On doing so, you will be able to see the skill developer interface. Click on Create Skill option to start building your first skill.

Next, you will have to give a name to your skill and choose the preferred language in which you want to build the skill.

Also, you will have to select the type of model you want to build. A Custom model is selected by default. In a custom model, you will have to create all of your skill’s intents. There are other pre-built models too. These models already contain specific intents and utterances which you can add to your skill.

Following this, you will have to choose a method to host your skill’s backend. Alexa-hosted method with a Node.js template is selected as default. You can also choose Python as the preferred language. The third option allows you to use your own backend resources too.

After selecting all the choices, click on Create Skill at the top-right to create your skill.

Conclusion

So far, we have gone through the basic steps required before starting to build a skill. Hope that this tutorial was informative. In the next tutorial, we will be building our first skill – “Hello World” in Alexa. So, if you’d like to go through it, you can click here.

Happy Learning!