Now, anyone can publish skills created using Alexa Skill Blueprints to the Alexa Skills Store in the US for customers to discover, use, and review. We’re also excited to announce new Skill Blueprints built specifically for content creators, bloggers, and organizations, so they can reach anyone with an Alexa-enabled device - with no coding required - adding to the more than 80,000 skills already available to customers in the Alexa Skills Store.
Please note the no coding required highlight. There is a lot to unfold in the announcement for content creators, but the main point is the democratization of the Alexa skills creation process. The Seattle company is making easier for creators with no coding abilities to add to the list of skills. And that is without doubt a wonderful opportunity for both Amazon and the creators: spreading the platform for the former and easiness of integration of their current content into voice for the later. However, there two issues that I keep pondering, the first one is the Achilles’ heel of voice tech so far: discovery. Even though this is clearly a step forward, as more users build skills, it will help with awareness and use, there is still work to do in getting users in front of skills. And the second issue is about this process of making it easy to everyone: In voice, the technology is not the imperative, but the design, the design of the conversations. For voice, the conversation is not content is the application. The conversation is the structure of the application. And thus, designing the conversations is where the real challenge lies for engaging voice first experiences.