The estimated reading time for this post is 6 minutes
Like any good tech, Alexa skills can make life easier and/or more fun. With over 70,000 skills available, Alexa is becoming increasingly useful in our daily lives.
But choosing from all of those skills can be confusing. How can you know which Alexa skills will be the best fit for your daily life?
Amazon has just released its list of the most popular Alexa skills in 2018. This list is filled with useful skills that can give you information, help with parenting tasks, play fun games with you, help you get more fit, test your knowledge, hone your cooking skills, and help you keep your New Year’s resolutions.
=> Want to explore more Alexa skills? Check out What Can Alexa Do? Here’s a New Way to Discover Her Skills
Whether you’ve had an Echo device for a while and are familiar with Alexa or you’re new to Alexa and Echo, you’re bound to find some new and helpful skills in this list to enhance your daily life.
Alexa Wellness Skills
These Alexa skills can help guide you to a healthier lifestyle.
Sleep and Relaxation Sounds can help you doze off to sleep as you listen to relaxing sounds. Choose from 125 sounds, such as thunderstorm or rain. For a full list of sounds, ask Alexa to “List Sounds.” Set a timer to have the sounds stop playing after a certain amount of time.
Headspace is an Alexa skill that offers guided meditation to help you relax. Each day this skill will guide you through a different meditation and a sleep exercise to help you fall asleep at the end of the day.
According to Headspace, this skill offers these benefits:
– 10 days of Headspace resulted in a 14% decrease in stress
– 3 weeks of Headspace resulted in 23% more compassionate behavior
– 3 weeks of Headspace made users 57% less aggressive and reactive towards negative feedback
(The developer notes: “Headspace is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease or medical condition. Cited studies’ methods and results are consistent with accepted social science research regarding meditation.”)
Fitbit is an Alexa skill that can help you keep track of your daily activity. Connect your Fitbit account to this skill and ask Alexa about your fitness progress throughout the day.
Chop Chop is an Alexa skill best used with the Echo Show or Spot. This skill shows videos to teach you cooking techniques, such as the proper way to chop vegetables.
Alexa Daily Habits Skills
Use these Alexa skills to help you every day.
Find My Phone uses Alexa to ring your phone when you’ve misplaced it. Enable this skill, then ask Alexa to “Find my phone.” Your phone will be called so it’ll ring and you can find it. Note that this skill only works with U.S. phones.
TuneIn Live connects your TuneIn account to Alexa. Listen to over 20,000 sporting events, including NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL games.
AnyPod is a podcast player that lets you use Alexa to listen to any podcast. Open the AnyPod skill and ask Alexa to play the latest episode of any podcast. Use your voice to command Alexa to pause, skip ahead or rewind podcasts.
Big Sky is an Alexa skill that can give you hyper-local weather forecasts for your exact address. Allow your location to be shared and Big Sky can tell you the hour-by-hour forecast for your location and for other location around the world. Big Sky can also give you the air quality index and tell you the major pollutant for your area.
Make Me Smart helps you keep up to date with what’s happening in the world. Hosts Kai Ryssdal and Molly Wood will explain current events and define terms to help you understand what’s going on in the news. From the skill description, “For example, you’ll find out how 5G works, how the economics of a summer blockbuster have changed, and why household debt it isn’t always a bad thing.”
Alexa Skill Blueprints is a new Alexa feature in 2018 that helps you create your own personalized Alexa skills. Create personal stories, task lists, quizzes and more using Alexa Skill Blueprints.
Alexa Family Skills
These Alexa skills can make family life more fun!
Lemonade Stand simulates owning a business. Learn what goes into running your own lemonade stand. Earn experience badges as you expand your business.
Animal Workout is a fun way to get your kids moving. They can pretend to be an animal as they perform the exercises Alexa tells them to do. Great for rainy days when kids need to burn energy!
Chompers is an Alexa skill that makes tooth brushing fun. Say, “Alexa, open Chompers” and have Alexa entertain your kids with riddles, jokes, silly songs and fun facts as they brush. This skill could very well be the best way to get your kids to brush for the entire two minute period that dentists recommend.
Kids Court is an Alexa skill that can settle sibling squabbles simply. Enable the skill and let Alexa be the judge of who is in the wrong and what the punishment should be.
Sesame Street is an Alexa skill that lets your kids converse with Elmo. They can speak directly to Elmo, learn new words and play Hide and Seek with him.
Alexa Game Skills
These are the top Alexa game skills for 2018.
Question of the Day is a quick, fun way to test your knowledge. After you’ve enabled this skill, ask, “Alexa, what’s the Question of the Day?” Alexa will ask you a general trivia question and give you four possible answers.
If you get the answer correct, you win points. Alexa will also tell you the percentage of players who also got the answer correct.
Yes, Sire is a roll-playing game for mature audiences. Make choices to save a medieval kingdom and stay in power.
The Magic Door is another roll-playing game that lets you explore different stories. After you’ve enabled the skill, head to the skill page on Amazon to follow the instructions and explore the stories in order.
Would You Rather for Family is a fun family game that asks you to decide between two choices. You can play by yourself or have even more fun by playing with others.
Skyrim Very Special Edition is a mature roll-playing game that lets you take your rightful place as the Dragonborn of legend. Complete quests such as mastering your weapons, spells and shouts.
Trivia Hero tests your knowledge of trivia. Answer as many questions as possible in 60 seconds. Play by yourself or against as many as 20 opponents.
Head’s Up is the Alexa version of Ellen DeGeneres’s favorite game. Ask questions to guess the word on the card before time runs out. Choose from categories such as:
– Superstars
– Blockbuster Movies
– Favorite Fictional Characters
Beat the Intro is a fun music game where you guess the title and artist of a song as fast as you can. Play by yourself with the Daily Challenge or against others using Echo Buttons.
Learn more about Echo Buttons at => Echo Buttons – Making Alexa More Fun!
National Geographic Geo Quiz tests your knowledge of geography. Get six new questions every day to learn about the world around you.
=> Also see GeoGuessr – How Well Do You Know the World?
World Mathematics League tests your math skills as you compete against your opponents. If you share your location you can be part of a team. The more members of your team, the more points your team can win.
Your Thoughts
Have you been using Alexa to help make your life easier? Have you tried any of these top Alexa skills for 2018? Which Alexa skills are your favorites?
Share your thoughts in the Comments section below!
Awesome article. I am looking such type of article, Finally i reach right web page. All Alexa skills is very interesting. one of my best “Make Me Smart”.
Hi Jack, I’m glad you found this article to be awesome. I hope that these Alexa skills work well for you, and that you keep enjoying Make Me Smart.