Alexa just received a pretty hefty upgrade with ‘Alexa Blueprints’; a new feature that lets you create custom responses to your voice requests.
Effectively, the new functionality allows anyone to create their own Alexa skill. You could have Alexa save useful bits of information (“Alexa, what’s the Wi-Fi password” would save a lot of pain), or else program in jokes or quizzes to keep the rest of your household amused.
These custom responses can be created at blueprints.amazon.com, reports TechCrunch. You’ll need to sign in with your Amazon account in order to get started, as the responses are kept private to your own Amazon Echo devices.
Once you’ve done that you can then pick from a variety of templates (aka blueprints) and begin crafting your own responses.
It’s clear from these templates that a lot of them are aimed at children, and from the videos that have been circulating on YouTube it’s clear that they already get a lot out of interacting with the voice assistant.
We think it’s the ‘Storyteller’ class of Blueprints that has the most potential. We’ve been very interested to see interactive audio stories start to take off on the smart speaker, and it could be very interesting to see an established author attempt to tell a story through Alexa. Runescape: One Piercing Note was an interesting idea, but we think there’s so much more potential in this new and exciting medium.
If you’re in the US, this functionality is available right now, but if you’re elsewhere it seems you might be able to access it by changing your Alexa language settings to ‘English US’ in your Alexa app (although we haven’t been able to verify this ourselves just yet).
What’s the first thing you’re going to make using the new functionality? Let us know @TrustedReviews.