voice design

Alexa Skill: My Countdown

Cloud Services, Consumer Products, Prototyping + Development, UX and Product Design, Voice Interfaces

My second published Alexa skill was born from a request from a dear friend. We were planning a joint family trip to Disney World, and my goddaughter wanted to know how long until the big day. Wouldn't it be nice to have a skill to make it easier for her mom to answer that question? Have an Alexa device? Enable the My Countdown skill for free today! The design process for this skill was somewhat unique. I initially designed the skill as the core example around which I built the sample deliverables for my now world-renowned voice design workshop, Giving…

Alexa Skill: Trainer Tips

Cloud Services, Consumer Products, Conversational UI, Leadership, Prototyping + Development, UX and Product Design, Voice Interfaces

When I joined the Alexa team, the Skills store was still in its infancy. One of my first responsibilities on the team was to perform skill submission reviews, which gave me a unique perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the early Skills platform. Still, I wanted to learn more deeply, and the best way to do that was to dive back into coding and develop my own Alexa skill. Do you have an Alexa device? Install the Trainer Tips skill for free! I developed Trainer Tips in early 2016, and it was one of the first 1000 skills approved…