“Alexa Skills” are tasks that Alexa performs by learning the user’s requests. These skills are developed by thousands of developers using the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). ASK is a collection of APIs, documentation, and code samples. It handles the hard work associated with voice interfaces, including text-to-speech encoding, natural language processing, and speech recognition. It allows developers to borrow Amazon’s knowledge base in voice design to build skills quickly and easily.
One can use AWS Lambda and other custom server environments to make Alexa Skills for their existing platforms.