Covered by @sarahintampa on TechCrunch: Amazon gives the Alexa ‘app store’ a makeover, now lets you add new Skills by voice
Things to highlight:
Now Skills are organized into categories ....the Alexa Skills homepage features collections of Skills to enable better discovery of these add-onsAmazon has rolled out a new feature that lets you add Skills to your Alexa device just by speaking@drew23 would love to hear from behind the scenes here :)
@bentossell@sarahintampa Thanks Ben! When the Alexa companion app first launched, it was done in the spirit of the MVP. There was excitement but nobody truly understood how widely it would be accepted by the public. Fast forward to today, we took literally a ton of Alexa data to quickly release the voice software store. Two key elements was to improve the discoverability from a GUI perspective and to enable skills by voice (VUI). This is a small step but we believe the correct one to transform the Alexa platform to enhance everyone's lives. Including @nivo0o0 mom (mentioned below :)
Alexa still needs to fix how you interact with skills, most skills are far too much work to use to be worthwhile or timesaving:
1. You have to memorize your Skill's names to use most of them ie "Alexa, open BART Times" or "Alexa, ask Uber to request a ride"
2. There is no context or stringing together of commands I can't say "Turn off the Living room and Office lights", Instead I have to issue separate commands for each room.
This is great! Having played around with Alexa for the first time all weekend, I an say that....
1. Enabling skills by voice is great (going to the Alexa app to install them usually means a command didnt work and kind of cuts into the flow of things)
2. My mom absolutely loves her, see this tweet thread: https://twitter.com/Nivo0o0/stat...
3. Alexa meets Product Hunt: https://vine.co/v/5uOT72XOgpx
1st weekend with Alexa:
Makerpad
Upcoming
God Hates Charades - 8 Bit Expansion
VC Puzzle