Hello everyone. Thanks for tuning in again. Now if you have an Amazon Echo
device, you're going to want to mute your mic if you're sitting next to your
device, because I am going to use that wake word a few times here in the video.
What I wanted to do today is I want to create a custom Alexis skill for your Echo.
Now when we're doing that, we have to go to blueprints.amazon.com and you're
going notice right on the front page right away it says you're accessing
blueprints portal from outside of the US. If you're like me and you're outside
of the US, you do need to set your Echo device inside the Alexa app to English
US. If you don't do that, none of this is going to work. So now on the iPhone, I
just want to show you really quickly, here in the settings inside the app, you
can see my device and you'll see down at the bottom, English United States. If I
had anything else, this is not going to work. So back to blueprints amazon.com.
I'm just going to run you through the page. You can see they give you a little
process here at the top. They want you to basically pick a blueprint, start
building, and then you can go ahead and use it, and you can share it as well.
That's a new skill that they've given everyone. So you can see the different
sections here. There's a fun and games, there's learning and knowledge, there's
something called at home, and then there's a storyteller feature as well.
Those are all the different sections. We're actually going to use one of the
at home features today. We're going to go ahead and create a babysitter skill. So
I'm going to tap on babysitter, and what this is intended for is basically, when
you have a babysitter you can just give them a bunch of information. So
on the page, if you wanted, you could listen to a sample of it, but essentially
I'm just going to click "make my own" here. Now Amazon is going to walk you through
a tutorial, but I'm just gonna bypass all of that. We're going to go right to
developing the skill. You can see there's a number of questions that essentially
you just need to answer. Sso here's the first question, when asked about the
morning schedule here's what your device is going to come back and say. I'm going to
fill out all three of those morning, afternoon, and evening. Once those are all
filled out, there's more questions about allergies, medication, and any extra
special notes that you want to leave for your babysitter. Something that I think
is very useful, and it's interesting how Amazon did this, they're saying where to
find things. You can see that I could pick any item. They started with diapers,
so I'll leave that in there. Where's the Tylenol, I can add that. You could just
add items, and add items, and add items. So you can tell them where to find anything.
If there are any actions that they need to know how to do, for me my TV is a little
bit complicated, so I'm going to make sure that there's instructions there for
that. And then of course the emergency contacts are going to be added in here.
You have to scroll all the way back up to the top and you go to the
experience side. Here's where you can customize the greeting for the skill and
you can also add in little extras here and there about if they re enable or re
ask for the skill to start. You can have different greetings after the first time,
and then you can also change the exit or the way that the skill ends. Now I'm
going to hit next up at the top. You can change the name, and then you're just
creating the skill. That's it, and it's attaching it to your account, and again
if your Echo is set in English US, it will go basically right to your device.
Just a couple more things that I want to show you after that's created. Here's
what the screen looks like, you can see it's working to create the skill. Once
it's created, here's what the screen looks like, and you can see there's an
edit. So you could go back in and edit if you wanted to. There's also a delete if
you were done with this skill or you wanted to
start fresh. You can also see how you would open it up, so you can see try
saying "Alexa, Open My Babysitter" and you can also see the status that it's ready
to use, and of course who can access this. Right now that's just me, so let me
show you how you can share. Once you click under the edit and delete buttons
to share, you have a bunch of different ways to go about that. You could email it,
you could put it on Facebook. Once you hit this share button, you're
basically making it available for other people to utilize. Anybody with the link
could then go ahead and use this skill. So obviously you want to think about
what kind of information you're putting in a custom skill before you go ahead
and do that. Now if you incorrectly share this, or you don't want to share it, you
decide you don't, there's actually a revoke button on the webpage. So I'm
going to go ahead, I'm going to revoke that share access. Let's do a demo, let me show
you how this works. "Open my babysitter." "Hello and thanks for
all your help today. This is your custom guide to caring for
our child. If you have any questions, just ask. You can ask about schedules,
allergies, medicines, how things work, where to find things, emergency contacts,
or special notes. What would you like?" "What's the afternoon like?" "Sure for
afternoon our child returns from school at 3:00 p.m. he will likely need a drink..."
"What else would you like to know?" "How do I work the TV?" "Ask Alexa, then use
Alexa to change volume, and the Harmony remote to adjust the channel. What else
would you like to know?" "Bye." "Bye for now, thanks again."