How to launch an Alexa Skill in a week with no technical knowledge
By: Jesús Martín
Tags: Voice Ui, No Code, Alexa, UX, Product Design

Now that countries are starting to reduce the confinement of the population for the coronavirus crisis, I would like to share the experiment that I launched in Alexa at the beginning of the pandemic. I believe this experiment is a great example of product design, including success, failures, and learnings, but more than anything, it’s proof that we can build a VUI product (voice user interface) with impact, in a short time and little technical knowledge.

So, let me walk you through my “Alexa, open Stay Home” project, every step I took, how I published, and the results I got.

The time frame for the project “Stay Home”

Last March 9, a lockdown for all the citizens -forcing all the population to stay home- was declared in Italy. The Spanish government followed on the 14, and different countries also followed their leads in the coming weeks. On March 19, 5 days after it was obvious to everyone the problem was going to spread worldwide I published the Alexa Skill “Stay Home”, with fun activities to do at home in Spain. Only four days later it was available in all English and Spanish speaking countries: México, EEUU, India, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom.

Why an entertainment Skill for coronavirus crisis?

In early March most of the world realized that we were all leading to the same path China had followed, and the tech community started to join efforts in finding solutions for the new problems we were about to face.

Those days I took part in several meetings with passionate people who shared great ideas that ended up being projects that we are seeing now.

Most of those projects deal with this new health situation, willing to have a bigger impact and become a game-changer for all the population. I didn’t have the infrastructure to deal with those problems from my own, so I took a side one. I wouldn’t save the world, but hopefully, I could ease a situation linked with the health emergency: fight boredom.

Half of the world was going to be locked down 24 hours a day for weeks and soon 24 were going to be too many hours with too little to do.

Photo by Jeff Hendricks on Unsplash

How did I define the MVP for “Stay Home”?

Solutions to fight against excessive free time can be many and my project could be anything. That’s why I set two constraints:

Avoid solutions with screen devices . Screens were going to be the option by default for many and creating something out of them was a great driver.

. Screens were going to be the option by default for many and creating something out of them was a great driver. Being able to develop it by myself in a short time. The situation was going to last more than a couple of weeks, but hopefully, after a couple of months thing would get better.

A voice-first experience for a smart speaker was a great way to deal with the first constraint. For the second one, I adopted one of the formats that work the best worldwide: short ideas about any topic. You can find success stories in any country with their question of the day, the riddle of the day, joke of the day, and… definitely “whatever of the day”. Suggesting activities one at a time sounded like a quick win for the specific problem I was trying to face.

Where did I get the content from?

One of the most common problems in the development of conversational interfaces is the one related to the generation of content. Content creation is a complex process: you will need to deal with ideation (with a similar creative process than those for TV or radio) and its production (which might need actors, recording studios, etc.).

In my case, in order to solve the production problem, I stuck to short messages where a real narrator is not that crucial and TTS voice can be good enough. I also used sound effects to break the monotony of the automatic voice.

For the content writing, I searched on the Internet already made ideas for staying at home and reached a wonderful list from a Spanish content creator. It took me only one email for having her approval to use the content.

How to develop your Alexa Skill without coding knowledge

The format I chose is a well-defined one and you can find lots of it under “Fact Skill”. It is something like the ABC for voice interfaces. While I was in Amazon I had tested a template for it (and reviewed many Skills), so I knew that the first steps were easy. In the last few months, they have improved the creation process even more and you can have your own Skill from zero in 5 steps: