20 Alexa Skills You Should Try
Amazon’s Alexa is in more devices than ever and the Skill Store is adding new entries all the time. There are more than 100,000 skills for the voice assistant now and while plenty of them are poorly made or a waste of time, there are quite a few gems to discover. We’ve picked out 20 of the most noteworthy, useful, and fun Alexa skills to try out whether you’ve just received your first Echo Dot for the holidays or have Alexa powering every room in your home.
Allrecipes
Allrecipes offers a huge collection of recipes with audio instructions, along with visual guides for smart displays and a search function for those trying to figure out what they want to make.
Baby Stats
Baby Stats is aimed at new parents and helps them keep track of everything about their new child. They can add information about how the baby is feeding, sleeping, and a dozen other elements, retrieving the information in a way that makes trends easier to see.
Bamboo Math
A very useful teaching guide for math that can help adults and children both navigate homework and prepare them for upcoming math subjects.
The Bartender
The Bartender is exactly what it says, a straightforward guide full of recipes and instructions for making pretty much every cocktail you’ve ever heard of and quite a few you haven’t.
Big Sky
Big Sky provides a hyper-local weather report based on street addresses and users can set alerts about specific weather events. There’s also a premium subscription with detailed radar images.
Curiosity
Curiosity is a fun trivia dispenser that will share interesting tidbits on command. It offers a choice of categories and continues to add more facts to its database.
Escape the Room
An audio version of the escape room experience, the virtual puzzle game has a few free scenarios, with others available for purchase.
Find My Phone
Find My Phone is a basic but incredibly useful skill, Find My Phone calls your mobile phone to help you locate it. The skill also allows additional phone numbers to be added so you can help others find their phones at your home.
Kayak
Kayak offers an audio format for the trip planning and booking website. The skill will tell you both how much a trip will cost and how far you can travel based on how much money you want to spend.
myChevrolet
Chevrolet has the most reviewed Alexa Skill among car companies, but they all offer similar features like unlocking the car or starting it remotely. These skills are likely to become standard as more carmakers include voice assistants of some form in their future designs.
NASA Mars
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory created this surprisingly in-depth skill, which offers up-to-date information on the Mars Curiosity Rover and its experiments. The skill can also answer a lot of general questions about Mars and NASA’s Mars missions.
News Feed
Audioburst’s News Feed skill creates a unique and personalized news bulletin built from the user’s choice of radio and podcast episodes.
PayPal
The ubiquitous digital money broker’s skill lets you manage your PayPal accounts, including sending or requesting money by voice.
Question of the Day
Matchbox’s famous trivia game offers daily trivia questions to answer. Users can also buy sets of questions to play a trivia game with up to four people at a time.
Skyrim Very Special Edition
Bethesda Game Studios turned what began as an April Fool’s joke into an incredibly in-depth audio RPG based on the popular video game.
7-Minute Workout
An audio personal trainer for a quick mix of exercises. It offers a choice of different intensity levels and is designed to mix things up so you don’t get bored.
Spotify
Spotify just recently added a free version of the streaming services to Alexa devices, followed by Apple Podcasts.
Thunderstorm Sounds
One of the more popular ambient sound skills from Invoked Apps, the skill plays the sounds of an ongoing thunderstorm as an aid for getting to sleep.
Valossa Movie Finder
Valossa Movie Finder is a good tool for finding movies, especially if you can’t remember the exact name. It can identify a movie based on details you remember as well as suggest others you might like based on factors like genre and release year.
Yonomi
Yonomi connects smart home devices, including from different brands, allowing users to create new voice commands that can adjust multiple smart devices at the same time, like turning down lights and turning on the television simultaneously.
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