Quora, Allrecipes skills coming to Amazon Alexa devices

New skills from Consumer Reports, Allrecipes, and other companies are coming to Amazon Alexa devices later this year, Amazon announced today. An API for the creation of brief news updates called “flash briefings” was also announced today in a post by Alexa chief evangelist David Isbitski.

The news from Amazon comes a day before Google is expected to debut its Google Home device. The Google Home device and Google Assistant will compete with Amazon Echo and Alexa.

Perhaps the most interesting of the new skills comes from Quora, an app that lets the crowd vote on the best answers to people’s questions and has roughly 100 million unique visitors a month, according to Alexa website traffic data.

Skills from Allrecipes, and news from CNBC, Consumer Reports, and CNN are all due out in the coming weeks, an Amazon spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. A Quora skill is due out by the end of the year.

A BMW Alexa skill that tells you if your doors are locked was made available last Friday.

More than 3,000 Alexa skills have been created. The Alexa Skills Kit that lets people make Alexa skills was made available in 2015.

Since June, skills have been added that allow you to control General Electric home appliances and give you the ability to buy millions of items from the Amazon marketplace.

Alexa Voice Services have also been used to bring Alexa to devices like Nucleus home intercoms, Sonos speakers, and August Home smart locks.

The new skills were announced by Amazon today, along with the Alexa Moments advertising campaign, a video series to showcase more than 100 Alexa skills.