Amazon Brings New Developer Experiences to Alexa

At its Alexa Live virtual event today, Amazon introduced new features and tools for developers who target its digital assistant.

“There are now hundreds of millions of Alexa-enabled devices out there with customers around the world. Building with Alexa gives you a unique opportunity to engage with these customers while they are at home, at work, or on the go,” a new post to the Amazon Developer blog reads. “Leveraging the science that powers deep conversational experiences with Alexa, each of these features have been carefully curated to help you tap into specific areas where Alexa is displaying especially strong momentum.”

Key announcements include the Alexa Connect Kit SDK for Matter, Alexa Ambient Home Dev Kit, Alexa Voice Service (AVS) SDK 3.0, multi-assistant voice experience updates, and skill monetization tooling.

The Alexa Connect Kit SDK for Matter targets the emerging smart home standard, allowing developers to integrate their Amazon-focused products and services into the broader Matter ecosystem, including cloud connectivity, and over-the-air (OTA) updates for device lifecycle management, logs, and metrics. You can learn more here.

The Alexa Ambient Home Dev Kit is a new collection of services and APIs that Amazon hopes will unify the ambient smart home experience for its customers. It offers APIs for home state, safety and security, and credentials. The AVS SDK 3.0 combines the Alexa Smart Screen SDK and the AVS Device SDK into a single solution to help device makers build Alexa voice and multimodal experiences across multiple device categories.

As part of its Voice Interoperability Initiative, Amazon is improving its cross-assistant capabilities and now supports interoperability with Sonos Voice Control, Pioneer NP1, Skullcandy Push Active, and Grind. And the new Skill Developer Accelerator Program (SDAP) helps developers drive revenues by providing as-yet-unnamed incentives for building high-quality skills. There will be more information about that next year.

You can learn about these improvements and Amazon’s other Alexa-based developer updates in the original blog post.