Amazon Alexa: Beyond Native Skills, More Intuitive Than Ever!

by Guenee Salugsugan / Mar 31, 2017 06:13 AM EDT

Amazon Echo is a hands-free speaker that can be controlled by the user's voice.

Amazon Alexa developers will be getting promotional credits as announced by Amazon.com, Inc. This is to develop and host the majority of Alexa skills that use Amazon Web Services.

Amazon Alexa Developers Get $100 AWS Promotional Credit And More

Amazon Alexa, which is the voice service that powers the Amazon Echo, offers skills that allow customers to interact verbally with devices in a more intuitive way. Based on reports, the skills are basically apps that are built by third-party developers, allowing Amazon Alexa to bring more services and features. Among these Amazon Alexa skills are the capability to respond to general questions, play music and set a timer or alarm.

A lot of Amazon Alexa skill developers are reportedly taking advantage of the AWS Free Tier that offers 1 million AWS Lambda requests and up to 750 hours of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud compute time every month for free. However, reports also suggest that developers may incur AWS usage charges every month if they exceed the AWS Free Tier limits. To counter this, Amazon introduced promotional credits.

Amazon Alexa developers with published skill can now apply to get a $100 AWS promotional credit, including an extra $100 per month in AWS promotional credits if they incur AWS usage charges for the skill. This move is expected to take away the price barrier and encourage developers to create robust Amazon Alexa skills on AWS, keeping them away from Google Cloud, Benzinga reported.

Amazon Alexa Has More Uses Aside From The Native Skills

Amazon Alexa app, more than its native capabilities, can also be used on smartphones to download more "Skills" for the virtual assistant. As previously reported, the skills are the like Amazon Alexa's app, with each teaching her to do something new.

Meantime, some of Amazon Alexa's skills come from big brands like a financial management Skill. But on the other hand, most are smaller offerings that bring niche services such as the Skill that remind of some crafting recipes in Minecraft, CNET reported. Check out 50 Alexa Voice Commands (Amazon Echo) here: