Alexa: Using the Skills Feature

Hello, my name is Ricky Enger, and today we’re going to get a quick intro to using skills with our Alexa Amazon Echo digital assistant. That statement probably makes no sense right now, but it will by the end of this workshop. By the way, if you’re not yet familiar with how to use your Echo device, check out the first couple of workshops in this series to get up to speed.

Okay, so we have our awesome little digital assistant, and we’ve been able to accomplish so much just by asking it to do things for us. We’ve asked for things that our assistant already knows about, right out of the box. But what about things that our assistant doesn’t know yet? That’s where skills come in. We’re going to be teaching our assistant new things, or skills, to really expand what it can do for us. If the idea of actually teaching a piece of technology to do something sounds like a really weird and overwhelming thing to do, it sounds way more complicated than it is. So, let’s dive in and see how this works.

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