Alexa Skills: the best ad­di­tion­al features for Amazon Echo

Answering your general knowledge questions, placing orders on Amazon, playing music, managing ap­point­ments or even paying a com­pli­ment – these are basic Skills for the smart Echo loud­speak­er and its speech software Alexa. Whether it’s Amazon Echo Plus, the Dot, or Show versions, these functions are usually pre­con­fig­ured and can be used in con­junc­tion with other Amazon services.

Amazon has been co­op­er­at­ing with providers of a wide variety of services for some time now. This makes it possible to use an Echo speaker to access third-party provider services and control them using voice commands. The Alexa Skills store is con­tin­u­ous­ly growing, with more and more functions com­pat­i­ble with Amazon Echo. Alexa Skills are com­pa­ra­ble to smart­phone apps and are just as easy to install. The range available is large: at present there are ap­prox­i­mate­ly 10,000 functions. These include popular providers like the music-, audiobook-, and video-streaming platform Spotify, as well as services from lesser-known providers that provide an ap­pro­pri­ate program for every situation and purpose.

Alexa Skills can be used free of charge. All you need is the Alexa app, which can also be down­loaded free of charge, or set up on your PC through your Amazon account. Ad­di­tion­al costs are incurred if a tool requires ad­di­tion­al services. Making a purchase with the voice command, for example, is only possible with Amazon Prime mem­ber­ship, for which you pay a monthly or annual fee. To listen to Spotify over the loud­speak­er without adverts, you will also need to purchase an ap­pro­pri­ate sub­scrip­tion. Ac­ti­vat­ing Amazon Alexa Skills is free of charge – for the time being, anyway. There are several specific Skills available in the USA that require payment. It is also po­ten­tial­ly con­ceiv­able that Amazon will make Prime mem­ber­ship a pre­req­ui­site in the future, or offer a paid and unpaid version that has a reduced range of functions.

All available Skills can be found in the Alexa Skills store. If you want to install or set them up on a smart­phone, you need to download the Alexa app first from the app store – just make sure you download the correct one for your operating system. On your PC, the easiest way to access Skills is to go to the Alexa Skills section of the Amazon website on your desktop browser. A category tree in the left half of the menu makes your search easier. You can make the search more specific by using cat­e­gories like “Music & Audio” or “Travel & Transport.”

It is also possible to add Alexa Skills directly over the speaker by voice command and without prior reg­is­tra­tion. However, this does not work for features that require ad­di­tion­al personal in­for­ma­tion or in­stal­la­tions, or that require linking your Amazon account to a third-party account. For example, if you want to buy cinema tickets, it may be necessary to create a user account with the cinema company and provide them with your bank details.

The Alexa Skills store contains a plethora of ad­di­tion­al features. An ap­pli­ca­tion that tells you whether it’s currently a leap year? An app to help you make a decision when buying a pet? These Skills are pretty much su­per­flu­ous and will only be used once. On the other hand, there are plenty of Alexa Skills that are used much more fre­quent­ly. It can be hard to find the best Alexa Skills among the near-infinite Skills available.

We have separated the wheat from the chaff with our top Alexa Skills. These are functions that actually make life easier and help you get more out of the personal assistant.

Notepads are easy to lose, after crossing items out and adding new ones it becomes confusing to read and it always leaves you wondering if you’ve re­mem­bered every­thing. With Our­Gro­ceries, you always have your shopping list at hand, create multiple lists, and add items to your lists with the voice command. You can sync the app with any Android or iPhone devices so that other members of your household can add things to the list, making col­lab­o­ra­tion easy. When a change is made, all shopping lists will be synced in real time, re­gard­less of whether the item was added via a mobile device or the Amazon Echo. In addition, Our­Gro­ceries has other practical functions like a camera, barcode scanner, and a section to save recipes. Although Our­Gro­ceries is designed to be used as a grocery shopping assistant, you can also use it to create other check­lists and memos for yourself.

This Alexa Skill is extremely useful for people in a large family, people who live in a shared house, or friends trying to organize a party. Everyone can input or remove what they do or don’t want, nothing is purchased twice or forgotten. Instead of using a pen or keyboard to input items on the list, you can use the voice command with the Amazon Echo. This is par­tic­u­lar­ly useful when looking in the fridge or while cooking and you notice an in­gre­di­ent is missing or is in short supply. This Alexa Skill saves time, stress, and can even help you save money.

If you want to keep up to date with world politics, local affairs, the economy, or culture, the Alexa Skills store has a wide variety of news Skills to fit your needs. Numerous popular pub­li­ca­tions and TV stations provide their own Alexa Skills, providing in­quis­i­tive users with the latest headlines and daily summaries. These include Fox News, the Wash­ing­ton Post and the Wall Street Journal, among a whole host of others.

For people who just want a quick roundup of headlines from a wide range of sources, without having to access multiple ap­pli­ca­tions, an easy solution is to enable the “Flash Briefing” function with Alexa. Use the voice command “Alexa, what’s my Flash Briefing?” and wait for her to provide you with your own per­son­al­ized news report, drawing from a selection of sources you can choose yourself, including the big-name pub­li­ca­tions already mentioned.

The wildly popular radio streaming service SiriusXM has its own Alexa Skill, allowing you to stream music through your Amazon Echo. The Skill is free to download and users can enjoy access to over 200 of SiriusXM’s best channels. The radio channel already enjoys a rep­u­ta­tion for well curated music channels, and the ease of being able to use it with Alexa’s voice command is appealing to many users. The downside, however, is that although the Skill is free to download, you will need to have an account with SiriusXM already set up, which is a fee-paying service. Luckily, they have plenty of paid options to choose from so you will no doubt be able to find one that suits your needs. Bear in mind that in order to stream SiriusXM through your Amazon Echo you will need to have a “SiriusXM All Access” or “SiriusXM Streaming” sub­scrip­tion. If you aren’t sure whether or not this service is for you, and are hesitant to take the financial plunge, all their packages come with a trial period so you can test it out.

If you’ve always liked the idea of learning one new word per day, look no further than Daily Buzzword. This fun Alexa Skill is free to enable, and upon in­struc­tion will read out the “buzzword” of the day, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dic­tio­nary. To help you commit the word to memory, Daily Buzzword will also read out an example of the word used in a sentence, and provides you with a short quiz to cement the word in your knowledge. If something is unclear, users can ask the Skill to “repeat” the word as many times as necessary.

The Daily Buzzword Alexa Skill will help expand your vo­cab­u­lary and knowledge, providing you with the tools you need to learn – much more helpful than just reading a word-a-day calendar or the like! The Skill is also par­tic­u­lar­ly suitable for children or high schoolers preparing for their SATs.

Are you going on vacation and want to brush up on a few local phrases? Do you feel guilty about letting your high school French slip away and want to pick up your practice? Maybe your New Year’s res­o­lu­tion was to learn a new language and you feel like throwing yourself into Japanese? If so, then Trans­lat­ed is the Alexa Skill for you.

This handy Skill is free to enable and allows you to translate words and brief sentences from English into your target language (the app currently offers trans­la­tion services from English to Arabic, Basque, Por­tuguese, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Flemish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, In­done­sian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, and Welsh). What makes this Skill stand out in par­tic­u­lar is that your chosen words and phrases are not read out in the false, robotic Alexa voice, instead they are spoken by a native speaker, allowing you to hear and copy the correct pro­nun­ci­a­tion every time. While the app is no sub­sti­tu­tion for language lessons or immersion, it can be a helpful way to take those first steps towards learning a new language, and can also be a useful Skill if you need a quick word or phrase trans­lat­ed on the go. Perfect for traveling!

Whether you’re planning a weekend outing or just trying to pick out clothes for work, having a handle on the weather forecast is an important aspect of daily life. While Alexa has a perfectly adequate weather forecast function built in, it cannot compare to the detail and accuracy of Big Sky. Big Sky is free to enable and uses the Dark Sky API (a weather all for Android and iOS) to give you tailored weather forecasts for a specific address. This hyper-localized service can give you to the minute forecasts, including pre­cip­i­ta­tion, humidity, dew point, windspeed (in four different mea­sure­ments), UV index in­for­ma­tion, and baro­met­ric pressure. Big Sky also has a built-in weather almanac so that you can compare weather in­for­ma­tion from any day in the past. You can choose between Celsius and Fahren­heit for your tem­per­a­ture mea­sure­ments, as well as other imperial or metric system mea­sure­ments. These settings, as well as your saved location, can be changed at any time.

Big Sky also has a paid premium version, which has even more features like saving numerous addresses and being able to access real time, hyper-accurate forecasts for locations around the world at a moment’s notice. Although this level of spec­i­fi­ca­tion might suit a me­te­o­rol­o­gy fan, there is plenty to gain for any person wanting an accurate weather report.

Your Echo speaker can help you with baking, cooking, and preparing food. Do you ever find yourself mid-way through preparing a meal only to realize that you don’t have one of the key in­gre­di­ents? Maybe you or a family member have dietary re­stric­tions and your recipe calls for something un­suit­able? In­gre­di­ent Sub can help. This Alexa Skill is free to enable and is a simple tool which provides you with a list of suitable in­gre­di­ent sub­sti­tutes, including specific quan­ti­ties. Never find yourself giving up half way, or quickly running back out to the su­per­mar­ket again!

Another way that your Echo can help you when it comes to cooking is providing you with recipe ideas. The Alexa Skills store has a wide range of recipe apps, but Love and Lemons really stands out. Providing you with recipes from the popular online blog, Love and Lemons is a healthy, seasonal, whole-food based recipe portal and can help you pick out a meal that is seasonal (good for the en­vi­ron­ment and your budget) and wholesome, so you know that you’re providing only the best for you and your family. The Alexa Skill provides step-by-step recipes, and you can pause and resume whenever necessary, as well as make use of a timer function to help you cook to the best of your ability.

Whether you are planning a weekend vacation, a business trip, or are simply trying to go around your daily life, a helping hand when it comes to getting around New York City is important to anyone. Alexa Skills like NYC Subway Status provides you with status updates for different lines on the New York City subway system, including a summary of all the lines. Conductor provides the same service, but with a wider catchment – they also cover the LIRR and MetroNoth, as well as the subway. Both Skills are free to enable and can help users avoid delays and mishaps when planning their day in New York City. While both Skills are location-specific, there is no doubt that countless other Alexa Skills provide this real-time in­for­ma­tion for other met­ro­pol­i­tan hubs in the USA.

With the advent of the Internet of Things, more and more people are kitting their homes out with smart devices to make them more ergonomic. There are countless ap­pli­ances that can be connected to Alexa so that a simple voice command can get your household up and running before you’ve even gotten out of bed. We’ve all already heard of TVs and light fixtures that can be voice con­trolled but, there are some other note­wor­thy Alexa Skills that might not jump to the forefront of a budding home-modifiers mind.

Garageio is a Skill available free to enable which works in con­junc­tion with a Blackbox installed in your garage. This Skill allows you to control and monitor your garage door, without needing to sub­sti­tute or tamper with the door opener you already have. Once your Garageio BlackBox is installed, you can download the Alexa Skill to your Amazon Echo and have peace of mind knowing that you have eyes on your garage no matter what time it is or where in the world you are.

Another helpful Skill and device com­bi­na­tion is Blossom. Like Garagieo, it works in tandem with your already-installed device, allowing you to control your lawn sprinkler remotely at any time, in any place. Never worry about a brown lawn or half-dead plants again!