5 Alexa skills to try this week

This time a year ago, Amazon’s Alexa had a little more than 100 skills. Today, there are more than 7,000, and new skills are being added fast. Last November, Amazon launched the Alexa Skills Marketplace to allow the owners of devices that speak to Alexa to share, shop, and enable skills on Amazon.com.

Here are five skills released within the past week that are worth checking out.

The Late Night Poet

This skill reads you poems that are then sent to the Alexa app in case you want to read them again later. That may sound like a parody, and it is a bit choppy, but a service for late night poems seems like the sort of thing that could be pretty entertaining and is somehow fitting for a voice interface.

Civics Practice Test

Civics Practice Test helps you get ready for the U.S. citizenship and naturalization test.

In real life, the citizenship or naturalization test is a 10-question test. The questions are chosen from a list of 100 questions.

To pass, applicants must get six out of 10 questions right.

Roughly nine in 10 applicants pass the text, whereas only one in three U.S. citizens who take the test pass, according to U.S. News.

There are currently about half a dozen Alexa skills in the marketplace for people who want to practice for the U.S. citizenship and naturalization test.

CareGeneral

This skill helps groups of people, and specifically caretakers, keep track of in-home care. It is accompanied by an iOS or Android app. The CareGeneral Google Assistant action also launched this week, as one of about 60 skills made available.

Tattle

Tattle requires use of the Tattle iOS or Android app and draws on news outlets like ESPN, Variety, and Billboard for the latest headlines, which it then boils down into audio briefings. Instead of calling on various flash briefings, you can add the news you want to hear into a list and then listen to it with your smartphone or Alexa.

Reuters TV

This is a flash briefing — a short news brief from the international news agency. Each Reuters flash briefing lasts five minutes.