Amazon introduces tools to help developers create engaging Alexa Skills

Amazon is giving one more ability to its Alexa Skills- to fetch information regarding its user’s locations.

Aiming to help Alexa developers create more functional and engaging Alexa Skills, Amazon has announced some new tools for development.

Now developers can use the new Device Address API to build Alexa skills that operate using people’s location data, which includes street addresses, zip codes, and country locations. Coders use APIs, or application programming interfaces, to build powerful apps that use data from different sources.

“Your skill, for example, can deliver food and groceries to a customer’s home or provide directions to a nearby gym,” said Alexa evangelist Jeff Blankenburg in a blog post today.

The new API will allow developers to build skills where users provide consent to share this information. As an extra layer of protection, users can only agree to share their location via the Alexa mobile app – not by voice. That could cut down on accidental confirmations, as users will explicitly have to agree to this data sharing.

Along with the API tool, a skills analytics dashboard has also been made available to the creators of Alexa skills. The dashboard can track information like month-over-month skill adoption rates, total unique utterances, or the time of day users typically interact with skill.

Brands like Accuweather, Just Eat, and German retail chain, Real have already rolled out the new API to their own apps.