You can now shop for Amazon Alexa skills the same way you shop for anything else on Amazon.com, the company announced today.
Owners of Amazon Alexa-enabled devices like the Echo or Tap can find, enable, or disable skills via an Alexa skills marketplace or dedicated URLs for individual skills.
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In May, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos posited that Alexa may be the fourth pillar for the Amazon business model, so maybe it’s fitting that Alexa skills is now the first thing you see on the drop-down search bar menu on Amazon.com. More than 3,200 Alexa skills have been made by businesses and third parties that let you do things like lock your smart car or hear nearby tweets.
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“This is the first time that we are offering a pre-login discovery experience for Alexa skills. Before now, customers would need to log in to the Alexa app on their mobile device or browser,” said Alexa chief evangelist David Isbitski in a blog post. “Developers can also improve organic discovery by search engines by optimizing skill detail pages.”
Recently added skills include an intelligent assistant for Yahoo fantasy football and “augmented conversations” in the office through a HipChat-Alexa integration released Tuesday.
The Alexa skills website and app share the same 21 categories — ranging from business to shopping to weather — but the app appears to offer more ways to discover skills.
Unlike the app, the website tallies the number of skills in each category, so you can see that games, trivia, and accessories make up roughly one in three Alexa skills, and that there are only eight connected car skills. Alexa users can also shop based on customer 1-5 star ratings.
Alexa fans can browse for new skills added in the last week, 30 days, or 90 days and can break those skills down by category to find things like the latest music and TV skills.
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