Amazon Adds New Alexa Sound Library for Developers
Amazon regularly releases tools to make Alexa skill development easier. The latest announcement is for the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) sound library. The new sound library is a simple way for developers to add rich audio accents to their Alexa skills. A blog post by Amazon’s Shiraz Datta comments:
“The ASK sound library makes it easy for you to create an engaging customer experience by adding unique sounds to your skill. The library provides hundreds of sounds from 14 categories including, cartoon, home, human, nature, and transportation, among others…By carefully selecting a sound, you can create an experience that is more personal or relevant to your skill. For example, you can add applause when a user answers a question correctly in a trivia game or finishes a workout, a creaking door when describing a scene in an adventure skill, or the sound of a door opening when Alexa receives a command to unlock the front door.”
Alexa Sound Library and Speechcons
The new library covers a wide variety of sounds that are particularly well suited to games and storytelling. There are animal and battle sounds and others related to ambiance and science fiction. These new sounds complement the speechcons released in 2017 that are intended to add interesting interjections within a skill such as “bah humbug,” “ding dong” and “bonjour.” Taken together you can see how the sound library and speechcons can help developers make skills more immersive.
These tools also save developers the trouble of sourcing sound files for their skills and managing them. They can simply call them with a simple line of code. Amazon was initially focused on helping developers get Alexa skills live quickly. The many tools and templates achieved that goal and has yielded tens of thousands of Alexa skills across a half dozen countries. Newer tools such as the recently updated analytics dashboard and rich audio sound clips are more focused on enhancing the quality of skills.
Amazon Updates Alexa Developer Console and Adds Retention Statistics
