How to use alexa blueprints to create your own alexa skills

Craig Lloyd is a smarthome expert with nearly ten years of professional writing experience. His work has been published by iFixit, Lifehacker, Digital Trends, Slashgear, and GottaBeMobile. Read more.

There are a ton of Alexa Skills that you can get for your Echo, but now you can create your own basic skills quickly and easily using Alexa Blueprints.

We briefly talked about this before, but essentially Alexa Blueprints is an IFTTT-esque interface that lets you do things like create custom answers for specific questions, design your own trivia games, write your own adventure stories, and more. Here’s how to get started.

Start by heading to the Blueprints home page and make sure you’re signed into your Amazon account. From there, you can begin creating your custom skill. For this tutorial, I’ll be creating a skill that gives my pet sitter information about our cats in case they forget or have further questions about something.

Fortunately, Blueprints already has a template for this kind of thing. Scroll down a bit and click the “Pet Sitter” button.

Next, click the “Make Your Own” button.

You’ll be shown a quick tutorial of how Blueprints works. Make your way through it if you’d like and then hit the “X” button in top-right corner of the window.

After that, you’ll be given a handful of text boxes to fill in, like your pet’s daily schedule, where to find certain pet-related things in the house, and any special notes that the pet sitter should know. All you have to do is fill in the blanks!

When you’re done filling everything out, click the “Next: Experience” button in the top-right corner.

On this page, you’ll customize the greeting when the Pet Sitter skill is first opened, as well as a few other responses that you can customize. When you’re done with this step, hit “Next: Name” in the top-right corner.

Finally, you’ll name your new Alexa skill and then click the “Next: Create Skill” button.

On the next screen, you’re prompted to create an Amazon developer account, which is required in order to make your own Alexa skills. This step is simple, and it uses your current account info. Just click the “Update Account” button to make it happen.

Give it some time to create your new skill, which can take a few minutes.

Eventually, your skill will be ready to use on your Echo, but it may take some extra time in order for the skill to be editable if you need to make any changes to it.

To fire up your skill, just say “Alexa, open Pet Sitter” (or whatever you named your skill). From there, you can ask it questions and it will use your custom responses. For example, you might say “what’s the morning schedule” and Alexa will read back whatever information you set up there.

Obivously, this is just one example, but there are a handful of templates to choose from. You can do loads of other fun things, like set up a interactive fairy tale for your kids, create flashcards to help you study or learn a new subject, or even teach Alexa some new jokes.

‘Alexa, roast my friends and family’

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Amazon is making it possible for almost anyone to make their own Alexa skills with its new Alexa Skill Blueprints program. That means it’s now easier than ever to get Alexa to say whatever you want.

Sure, third-party Alexa skills have been around for years, but actually writing one still meant that you had to have a fairly good understanding of computer coding. And that’s a lot of effort to ask of people simply to get Alexa to roast their family members. I’m not saying it wouldn’t have been worth it, but Blueprints makes that all much, much easier.

With Blueprints, programming Alexa is as easy as filling in a couple blanks, Mad Libs style. To get started, head over to blueprints.amazon.com, and log into whatever Amazon account you use for Alexa.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll be presented with a list of possible options for making your skill. The new Skill Blueprints are essentially easy-to-use templates for creating your own Alexa skills. Building the skills is easy: just pick your template, and fill out the blanks. Some templates are a little more involved than others. For example, the compliment or insult ones just ask you to fill out a list of phrases you’d like Alexa to randomly choose from and pick a name for the skill, and the trivia games basically amount to adding a list of questions.

But others, like the babysitter blueprint, are far more complicated; there are fields for things like allergies and medications, daily schedules, where to find things in the house, and emergency contacts. The various storytelling tools have a whole interactive text editor, complete with sound effects and fill in the blank fields (to let you insert things like the name of your kids into the story) that need to be added separately.

Once you’ve finished your blueprint-generated skill, simply hit the “create skill” button to finalize. That will push it live to your account and whatever Alexa device(s) you have. The process does take a few minutes to roll out, so you will need to be a little patient. Then, just trigger the skill by asking Alexa, as you would any other Alexa integration. You’ll also be able to see a list of all your installed skills and edit them through the Alexa Blueprints site.

Amazon offers a lot of options in terms of what you can build with the various blueprints, but you’re very much limited to the sandbox Amazon is offering here. So while there are a bunch of trivia templates (for everything from family trivia to multiple choice questions to couples), you still have to play inside Amazon’s specific rules, which limits you to text-based answers. (So if you want to build a trivia game that plays song snippets, for instance, you’re out of luck.) This also means you can’t hijack standard Alexa commands like “play music” with some unrelated response.

The main difference between Blueprint-generated skills and full-fledged Alexa skills is the scope. While developers can publish their skills to the broader Amazon Alexa skill marketplace for anyone to enjoy, skills made with Blueprints are tied to your Amazon account and will only work on your devices. That’s both good and bad. If you’re making a skill with detailed information about your home for guests or a trivia game with your family history, you might not want that to be public. But that also means there’s no way to share your awesome, homemade Game of Thrones trivia game to your friends if they want to install it on their own devices.

While many people are probably going to just use Blueprints to say weird stuff for quick viral fame, Amazon also envisions more practical uses for the custom skills. The Houseguest template — which lets users leave easily accessible information about where to find things in the house, the Wi-Fi password, or how to lock up the back door or use the TV — seems tailor-made for Airbnb hosts. The templates for flash cards and quizzes look legitimately useful for studying.

Alexa Skill Blueprints is rolling out, and it’s going to be very interesting to see what people do with the new features in the coming days and weeks. But there are already millions of Alexa devices in people’s homes around the world, and Amazon has just made it possible for almost all of them to customize those products like never before. Who knows what will happen next?

One of the best things about the Amazon Echo range of speakers is the way that you can expand what Alexa is capable of with Skills. These Skills cover most things, but what about something much more personalised? That’s where this guide comes in, as I’ll show you how to make your own Alexa Skill with Alexa Blueprints.

Alexa Blueprints are a simple template-based way of creating your Skills. You can create simple quizzes to test people, or create a useful guide to your home, say letting Alexa tell the pet sitter where the extra food is kept. Most importantly, the results are completely tuned to you, and you can edit and update the Skill to make it work for you. Here’s what you need to know.

1. Log into Alexa Skill Blueprints

Everything you need is available online on the Alexa Skill Blueprints website (note, this link is to the UK version; if you log into the US site then you’ll be unable to enter phone numbers into Skills). Click the Sign In button at the top-right corner and then log in with your Amazon account. You’ll see a list of Blueprint templates below.

These are all created by Amazon and all work with the basic templates available. While there are a lot to choose from, they all follow a rough pattern. Q&A Blueprints are most common and let Alexa answer questions, such as where pet supplies are, how to adjust the temperature on the thermostat or when the rubbish should be taken out.

Then, you get the random response ones, such as jokes or burns, which will dish out a response when asked.

Amazon has boosted the Blueprints since launch with some that can track things such as Chore Chart, which will work out who’s done what jobs this week.

Games are available, either with quizzes to test knowledge or with sorting games. And, you can create interactive stories, where Alexa asks you to fill in some blanks, and then inserts your answers into a story. You can select any Blueprint and click the play button (on most of them) to hear an example of how it works; other Skills have text examples of what you can say and how Alexa can respond.

2. Select your template

To get started, select the template that best matches what you want to do. For this guide, we’re building a Skill to help pet sitters feed the cats (a Q&A type Skill). For us, there’s a Pet Sitter template available. Select your template and then click Make Your One to start the building process. If you can’t find the one that you want, then you can create a Skill using one of the more generic options, such as Q&A.

3. Fill in your data

Once you start, you’ll see a list of answers that you need to fill in. With the Pet Sitter option, you’ll see boxes for morning, evening and afternoon routines, medication, allergies and so on; plus lists of where to find things, how to do things and emergency contacts. Click Next when done.

4. Enter Experience information

Next, you can enter some information on how Alexa will respond when the Skill is used. Just enter in a welcome message, and you can also (optionally) enter additional messages for subsequent uses of the Skill.

Finally, you can enter a custom farewell and a background colour to be displayed on Echo Show devices. Click Next when you’re done.

5. Enter a name

Finally, you can enter a name for your Skill. You can pick anything that you want, but make it short and easy enough for people to say, using common words. I’ve just gone for ‘Cat Feeder’ for my example. Click, Next when you’re done to create the Skill. Next, Click Update Account to finish the process.

6. Try your Skill

It will take a few minutes to create your Skill, so you’ll have to be patient until the website tells you that it’s ready. Once done, you can go to any of your Echo speakers and say, “Alexa, open ”.

Alexa will read out your welcome message and will display the text version on a smart display, such as the Echo Show. You can then try a few of your questions, such as “How do I feed the cats”. It’s worth making sure that your answers make sense.

You can edit and add to your Skill by going back to the Blueprints page and selecting Skills You’ve Made, and then selecting one and clicking Edit.

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If you have an Alexa ecosystem and you don’t use the Alexa Skill Blueprint tool, you really aren’t optimising your Smart Home. Do not worry though! I will teach you how to use and make Alexa Skill Blueprints in this post and video (Coming Soon)!

Table of Contents

What is an Alexa Skill Blueprint?

Have you ever wanted to make an app but didn’t have the knowledge to do so? It’s frustrating when no one else has made what you need.

But there is a solution, Skills are like apps for your phone, but instead, they work on your Alexa devices. Whilst there may be thousands of skills out there to fit your needs and desires, you may find that the wide range of relaxation skills get in the way of you ordering a pizza or setting up a daily schedule list.

Skill Blueprints

Skill Blue Prints are great for creating your own personal skills in what can be literally minutes. You can use Alexa Blueprints to create custom games, stories, lists, flash cards and more!

There are a few categories to pick from:

• At Home
• Learning & Knowledge
• Fun & Games
• Storyteller
• Greetings & Occasions
• Communities & Organisations
• Business

Making your own skill

Like myself, once you found out these exist, you’re probably pretty eager to just jump straight in and find out more on this and how to get going. It’s exciting I know, but we have a few things we should cover first.

Have a target skill in mind

You should check out the placeholders that Alexa have in place to find some great ideas and understand the logic behind personalising and creating your own Skill. I only ever write skills for myself, so I don’t mind being vulgar or having it be a little rough around the edges.

But try to make sure you understand who’s going to be using this, my mum was not happy when she tried to use the commands I have listed on the fridge.

One thing I will say is make sure the name is easily distinguishable, Alexa doesn’t quite pick up my accent all the time and this has led to some frustrating encounters!

Amazon suggests picking names which follow these rules:

• Short- around two or three words
• Unique (different from the other skills you’ve made)
• Use simple words (Alexa is still learning first and last names)
• Use only letters, periods, and apostrophes

Don’t use “Alexa”, “Echo”, “Amazon”, “Computer”, “skill” or “app” in your skill name because these are the words you’ll use to wake up Alexa.

Customize for individual users

Whilst this isn’t something I’d recommend doing to a complete stranger, if you do wish to declare your undying love to someone in particular or use Alexa to sing a song with the person in questions name in it, it can be done.

The Alexa Skill Blueprint will automatically pre-fill with default/sample content to help guide you through your creative task, so you can add and remove whatever you need. This includes adding your crush’s name to the Skill.

Name it something funny like “What do you think of Brad?”, so Alexa quickly responds with “Brad looks like he should go to the gym more often”. Thanks Alexa.

With any blueprint, you can create unique stories and responses that are tailored to whoever is using them.

If you want to act like an adult (Not like me), you can make your Blueprint assign family members to household chores and assign a task to each person by name.

How to I test my Alexa Skill?

Once you make an Alexa Skill, it’s almost instantly available to use. It may take between 1 – 10 minutes. If you want to check the status of your skills, you need to go to Skills You’ve Made. Alexa Skill Confirmation

Once your skill says “Ready to Use”, you can ask Alexa to go ahead with it!

Updating your Alexa Blueprint skill

In the page you were on before, you’ll see that you can edit the skill by selecting Edit, if you can’t find that, you’ll need to go here first.

If you’ve shared your skill and made it available for others, only your Amazon account will have the permissions to update the Skill. Any changes you make are instantly available to everyone using the skill.

Deleting a skill will make it totally unavailable from that point, so I would be careful if you wish to have similar skills which have the same commands.

How do I share my custom made Alexa Skills?

Once you’ve created your skill, you can share it with everyone who has an Alexa-enabled device, so anything with Alexa as the AI Assistant. You can share the skill via Email, Social Media (Facebook, Twitter & Pinterest), Whatsapp & Text Message.

Your recipient will recieve a link which asks them to login to Amazon to allow their account to check over the details of the skill before enabling it.

Skills aren’t public by default, they’re private and only available via your own account. Once you share it publicly, it can be shared and sent around all over the web.

So if you have custom responses for friends and family be careful about sharing these!

How to share my skill?

1. Go to the Skills You’ve Made page and select a skill.
2. Under Access, the status of your skill will automatically be set to Just me.
3. In the Skill Actions section, select the Share With Others link.
4. You can choose to share a link to your skill via email, text, or as a social media post. After you share your link, your skill’s Access will be set to Shared.

To revoke access:

1. Go to the Skills You’ve Made page and select a skill.
2. Under Access, the status of your skill (if already shared) will be set to Shared.
3. Select the option to Revoke.
4. The Access of your skill will change to Just me.

Once a skill is shared, the name cannot be updated. To edit the name, you’ll need to revoke access to your skill first.

1. Go to the Skills You’ve Made page and select a skill.
2. Under Access, select the option to Revoke. The status of your skill will change back to Just me.
3. Choose edit icon next to the name of your skill.
4. After editing the name, go back to Skill Actions and select Share With Others.
5. When prompted, share the new link to your skill with recipients via email, text, or as a post over social media.

Hopefully, this guide helped you! If you’re using IFTTT I highly suggest checking out this guide on The Best IFTTT Recipes I Use.

Skill Blueprints give everyone the ability to create their own custom actions for their Alexa-powered devices.

Getting Alexa to say basically anything you want is now easier than ever – and the best thing about it – you don’t need to have any coding skills at all. Recently, Amazon has stated that they are introducing a new way to create Alexa skills .

An introduction to Alexa Skill Blueprints

Although 3 rd -party skills have been around for a couple of years at this point, until recently, writing one meant that you had to have some actual coding experience. What’s more, it took some time to actually write one. This obviously kept many people away from the idea of ever setting up their own.

However, Alexa Skill Blueprints makes the task much easier.

Writing an Alexa skill now only requires filling out a couple of blanks. The idea behind Blueprints is to make it easy for an average user to create a skill or Q&A that will only run on Alexa devices. These skills could be anything from a custom joke response to certain questions to setting instructions for your housekeeper or babysitter.

How do the Alexa Skill Blueprints work?

So how can you create a list of skills in a matter of minutes? You need to log into Amazon’s Alexa site , find a list of templates, and start crafting your own Alexa skills – simple as that. And while some templates are more complicated than others, they all function on the same principle – pick the template and fill in the blanks.

The simple skills, mostly the insult and compliment ones, only require you to select from a few phrases you would like Alexa to say and name the skill. On the other hand, creating a babysitter skill is a little bit more complex and will take at least 30 minutes to complete. These particular skills have fields for items such as medications, allergies, emergency contacts, etc to streamline the process for you as much as possible.

You can now make Alexa say anything. “Alexa, what’s the best version of Windows?”

Once you’re finished filling out the blanks, you need to click on “Create skill,” and you’re all done. That action will push your skill to your Amazon Alexa account and whatever device you have attached. We should warn you that the process takes a couple of minutes to complete, so you should have some patience.

If you want to activate the skill, just ask Alexa a certain question – as you would with any other integration. For a full list of actions, you need to visit the Blueprints website. There, you’ll be able to edit and sort your skills any way you please.

Blueprints Skills Vs. Standard Skills

Many people are wondering, are blueprint skills the same as the standard user-generated skills? Even though they are pretty similar, there are some noticeable differences between the two.

For starters, developers have the option to publish the skills they created on the Alexa Marketplace for anyone to use. In contrast, Blueprint skills are exclusively made for and tied specifically to your account. That means the skills you create with Blueprints can only work on the devices you own.

There are both positive and negative sides to that. On a positive note, if you make a skill with personal information about you or your family members, you surely don’t want it to be public. However, you won’t be able to share trivia games you designed with your friends either.

The Future of Alexa Skills Blueprints

So what does the future hold for Skills Blueprints? We know for sure that some people are going to use the platform to create weird trivia games and make Alexa say something inappropriate for a few minutes of viral fame.

But Amazon has bigger plans for the platform. For instance, you have the “Houseguests” skills template that allows users to leave important information for their guests. Moreover, the quiz and flashcards templates could be legitimately useful to students wanting to utilize modern tech like Alexa to study with.

When it’s all said and done, it’s definitely going to be exciting to see what users do with these new features. There are millions of Alexa users across the world and thanks to Amazon’s new platform; it’s now possible for them to fully customize their devices.

This post was sponsored by Amazon as part of an Influencer Activation for Influence Central and all opinions expressed in my post are my own.

My family got an Amazon Echo, and Alexa quickly became a part of our daily routine. We are constantly asking Alexa to do things for us: Alexa, Play Music. Alexa, Call Dad. Alexa, What’s the weather today? Alexa, Tell me a joke.

Alexa has tons of useful skills to make our lives easier. And now, with new Alexa Skill Blueprints, we can create cool Alexa Skills of our own. Alexa Skill Blueprints lets us make personalized skills for family games, chore lists, bedtime stories, and more.

With over 20 templates in six categories, anyone can quickly create custom Alexa Skills. Creating an Alexa Skill is as simple filling in the blanks!

A FEW OF OUR FAVORITE NEW ALEXA SKILL BLUEPRINTS

The Birthday Trivia Blueprint

My kids look forward to their birthdays all year long. We used the “Birthday Trivia” Alexa Skill Blueprint to make a quiz all about this month’s birthday boy.

To create his Birthday Trivia Quiz, my son and I went online to Alexa Skill Blueprints at blueprints.amazon.com. We filled in the template with the questions he wanted Alexa to ask.

When we were ready to play, we opened the Birthday Trivia Quiz skill. Alexa asks the questions for friends and family to answer. The birthday boy gets to decide who gave the right answer.

Birthday Trivia Quiz is a lot of fun for everyone to play, especially the birthday person! Our birthday boy was so excited to have his big brothers’ undivided attention.

Create cool stories with Storyteller Blueprints

Another cool Alexa Skill Blueprint the kids really like is “Storyteller.” These Blueprints let you create stories for Alexa to narrate, starring your kids! My boys especially like listening to the Adventure story with the dragon and the Sci-Fi story about the Aliens.

Listening to Alexa tell a story (above)

Alexa Skill Blueprints like the ones mentioned so far are created to be entertaining. Other Alexa Skill Blueprints are made to be useful. A couple of helpful Alexa Skill Blueprints my family has customized are Pet Sitter and Babysitter.

The Pet Sitter Blueprint

We use the “Pet Sitter” Alexa Skill Blueprint to make a guide that tells our neighbor how to care for our dog, Bear, while we are out of town. All our pet sitter has to do is say Alexa, Open Bear’s Care Guide, and all the instructions are there. Alexa can tell them details about Bear’s schedule, including how much to feed him and when he likes to go for walks.

The Babysitter Blueprint

Alexa Skill Blueprints has got child care covered, too. We use the “Babysitter” Skill to help our babysitter remember bedtimes and access important information like allergies and emergency contacts.

My family has a lot of fun using the cool Alexa Skills we make with Alexa Skill Blueprints. Your family can enjoy Alexa Skill Blueprints, too. There is no limit to how many skills you can create. New Skill Blueprints are being added often!

The smart speaker market has plenty of great options, but the Amazon Echo with Alexa has a useful option the others haven’t rolled out yet. When you use Alexa, you have the possibility of creating your own skills with absolutely no coding required!

What are Alexa Blueprints?

Alexa Blueprints is a new method for customizing your Alexa experience. Simply put, Blueprints are templates to create skills of your own to be used in your home without coding. It’s as easy as filling in the blanks.

When you make a skill, the default setting makes the skill available in only your account. However, you can share the skill with friends and family if you want.

What can you do with Alexa Blueprints?

There are five different categories of Skills Blueprints: Greetings & Occasions, Fun & Games, Learning & Knowledge, At Home, and Storyteller.

In the Greetings & Occasions category, you will find what amounts to a list of greeting cards you can send to someone for their birthday or other events.

Fun & Games contains blueprints for general trivia games and birthday trivia for parties to see who knows the birthday boy or girl the best. There’s also a game show blueprint and a blueprint to create an inspirational quote generator.

For those of you with kids in school or going back to school yourself, the Learning & Knowledge category has tools to help! Just create a skill using the Flashcards or Quizzes blueprints to aid you in your studying.

The At Home category has useful templates to create skills for your house guests, babysitters, or petsitters. You can create your own custom question and answer skill and even create a chore chart.

Time for a bedtime story? Templates in the storyteller section include ones for fairy tales, sci-fi, and fables.

How do you use Alexa Blueprints?

So where do you go to create these blueprints? Follow these instructions, and you’ll have your first skill done in less time than you can imagine.

2. Log in to your Amazon account that you use for your Alexa.

3. Click Upgrade when Amazon prompts you to create a developer account. It’s free.

4. Pick your template from more than twenty options. Check out Featured blueprints for inspiration.

5. Click on “Make Your Own.”

6. Fill in the blanks. Text fields are prefilled, and you can delete ones you don’t want by clicking the “x.” You can add more by clicking the “+.”

7. Name your skill.

8. Hit “Create Skill.”

9. Wait a few minutes. There will be a notification when it is ready to use.

10. Test it by asking Alexa to open it: “Alexa, open (skill name).”

11. If you need to, edit it in “Skills You’ve Made” at the top of the Alexa Blueprints page.

Proper names can be tough for Alexa to understand, so you want to avoid specific family names in your titles and stay more generic with your names. She can understand common special characters like question marks and dashes. If you use a symbol that she can’t understand, you will receive an error message.

Share your Blueprints

You can share an Alexa skill with your family and friends, but just remember, if you share it with them, they will be able to share it too. Take that into consideration before sending it out to the masses. Don’t worry, though. You are the only one who will be able to edit the skill.

1. Click on “Skills You’ve Made.”

2. Click Details.

3. Choose Share with Others.

4. Indicate if the skill is meant for kids under 13.

5. Pick a sharing method. You can use Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or a clickable link.

When they choose to use the app, they can find it in in their account under “Skills -> Your skills -> Personal skill,” then just have to click “Enable.”

You can see who is using your skill and revoke access whenever you want.

There is no limit as to how many skills you can create, so be creative and have fun with it!

Tracey Rosenberger spent 26 years teaching elementary students, using technology to enhance learning. Now she’s excited to share helpful technology with teachers and everyone else who sees tech as intimidating.

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By Mike Prospero 30 August 2018

Amazon’s Alexa Skill Blueprints program lets you create your own Alexa skills. Here’s how to do it.

In an effort to make its voice assistant even more personal, Amazon now lets users create their own Alexa skills. While not as expansive as the 30,000-plus skills available for all Alexa owners, Amazon Skill Blueprints allows you to make a few types of skills, such as quizzes, jokes, and even information for visiting houseguests and babysitters.

Update (8/30/18): Amazon has rolled out a number of new templates for Alexa Skill blueprints, including those for chore charts, roommate agreements, and selecting items from a list.

Here’s how to get started with Blueprints.

1. Go to blueprints.amazon.com and log in to to your Amazon account.

2. Select the type of skill you’d like to make. Categories from which you can choose are: Fun & Games, Learning & Knowledge, At Home, and Storyteller.

3. Choose a template. Within each category are a few skill templates; you must choose one of these templates to create a skill. For this how-to, we’re going to choose the Quiz skill in the Learning & Knowledge category.

4. Press the Make Your Own button to start. If you’re not sure if this is the skill you want to create, you can listen to a sample of what the skill will sound like.

In the Quiz Skill template, you will see a number of pre-populated questions and answers. You can edit these questions and add your own.

5. Press the Add Q&A button to add a new question.

6. Press the Next: Experience button in the upper right when you are finished adding questions.

In the screen that appears, you can customize the name of your quiz, the greetings that Alexa will use for each player, and the responses and sound effects used following a right (or wrong) answer.

7. Edit the Quiz intro. Type in the text box to change what Alexa will say when the quiz skill is launched. Below the text box is a drop-down menu with the name of the sound effect Alexa will play when the skill is launched. By default, Airplane Takeoff is selected; to change it, click on the drop-down menu and select from one of the hundreds of sound effects.

8. Edit player greetings. You can either edit or add player greetings, which Alexa will choose at random.

9. Edit quiz responses. Change the sound effect and what Alexa says when a player answers correctly or incorrectly.

10. Edit winner responses. Change the sound effect and what Alexa will say when a player wins the game.

11. Change the background image. If you’re playing the quiz on an Echo Show, this is the background image that will be displayed.

12. Press the Next: Name button in the upper right when you are finished customizing your quiz.

13. Change the name of the quiz to one you prefer.

14. Press the Next: Create Skill button in the upper right.

At this point, if you haven’t done so already, Amazon will prompt you to create a developer account, which is required to make or publish a skill. Click on the Update Account button.

Amazon will then create your skill, which takes a few minutes. You should see this screen as it’s being created.

15. When the quiz is ready, you should see a green bar at the top of the skill page. You can now play the skill on any Alexa device registered to you. On your skill page, you should also see buttons that will let you edit and delete the skill you just created.

16. To share your skill, go to the Skills You’ve Made page, and select the skill you’d like to share.

17. Look for a box titled Your Skill Actions. Select Share With Others.

18. A warning will appear, asking if the skill is intended for children under the age of 13. Select the appropriate response.

19. Select the method by which you’d like to share the skill: You can share your skill with email, text, WhatsApp or social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter.

• Who (or What) Is Alexa? We Explain Amazon’s Digital Assistant
• 20 Alexa Skills For Your Smart-Home Devices
• The Best Products That Work With Amazon Alexa

Michael A. Prospero is the deputy editor at Tom’s Guide overseeing the smart home, drones, and fitness/wearables categories. When he’s not testing out the latest running watch, skiing or training for a marathon, he’s probably using the latest sous vide machine or some other cooking gadget.

Amazon has rolled out a new tool for further enhancing the already strong repertoire of its intelligent voice assistant Alexa. Called “Alexa Blueprints”, the tool lets any Alexa user create their own customized Alexa skills or responses. And no, you don’t need to learn any coding for that. It’s all that simple. Look.

Create personalized responses Alexa Blueprints

With Alexa Blueprints, programming Alexa is as easy as filling in a Facebook account opening form. Amazon is providing users with a set of simple templates that help in creating personalised experiences for Alexa. All you need is to simply fill in the blanks, and it hardly takes a few minutes. For instance, you can make Alexa respond with your Mom’s name when you ask her “Who’s the best mom in the world?” You can also create your own voice apps, like a trivia game or bedtime stories, with your own personalized characters.

To build your own skill or custom Alexa response, visit the website blueprints.amazon.com and log in with the Amazon account you use for Alexa. Once you’re logged in, you’ll be presented with 21 templates across categories like Fun & Games, At Home, Storyteller, and Learning and Knowledge. Just pick your template and fill in the blanks as per your wish to make Alexa respond accordingly. The templates also come pre-filled if you just want to try them out before making your own. Amazon is expected to add more templates very soon.

After you’ve finished filling your own content, give a name to the skill and hit the “create skill” button to publish it. The skills and responses you just created will be available instantly on the devices associated with your account. It will, however, will not be available to the public or in the Alexa Skills Store. You can still edit the responses from the website even after you publish it.

Alexa Blueprints tool is only available for customers in the US at the moment. Though there’s no news on when it will be available in other markets, you can still access create customized Alexa skills by switching the language setting to English (US).

Does it have any practical application?

It is quite obvious that most of us would just use Alexa Blueprints to say weird stuff for quick viral fame. But Amazon does envision more practical uses for the custom skills as well. The Houseguest template, for instance, will be of a great use for guests in the house. You can leave easily accessible information about where to find things in the house, or the Wi-Fi password, with Alexa for a less hassled stay for the guests.

There are also a few other templates with more practical uses. Students could use the flash cards custom skill while studying, while a group of friends or roommates could design their own trivia games.