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Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, turned two years old yesterday. In that time, Alexa has gotten much smarter, with over 3200 skills ready for your commands. Alexa is now available on more Amazon products, including the Echo, Dot, Tap, Fire TV and Fire HD 8 tablet.
But with over 3200 skills, Alexa can get confusing. What can she do, exactly?
Whether you already own a compatible Amazon device and want to make better use of Alexa, or are thinking about getting one and wondering how you would use Alexa, learning about her skills is important.
If you ask Alexa what she can do, she will direct you to the Alexa app for your smartphone. The Things to Try section of the app has sections for what’s new, discover music, control smart home devices, ask questions, hear the news, listen to audiobooks, read Kindle books, and more. But you’re not going to see all 3200 of Alexa’s skills in the app.
Every Friday, Amazon sends out an email letting subscribers know what new skills Alexa has learned in the past week. But while the emails let you know about the new skills, finding all of Alexa’s skills can be challenging.
So how can you find out all that Alexa can do?
Discovering All of Alexa’s Skills
Amazon has a new section on its website that lets you shop for skills: Alexa skills section. Unlike many other sections of Amazon’s website, Alexa skills are all free.
[note] => Also see, Echo Dot and Amazon Tap: 2 New Ways to Ask Alexa Anything, Anywhere [/note]
You can search for Alexa skills by category or keyword and see how many skills fit in each category. Games, Trivia & Accessories has the most skills, with 1188, and Education and Reference is second with 899, as of this writing.
Connected Car has the fewest skills with eight. But if you have a BMW model year 2014 or newer, check out the BMW Connected skill. “Alexa, ask BMW to lock my doors.”
Skills are reviewed and ranked with stars, just as other products are on Amazon. You can search for skills according to how many stars they have. Search 4 stars **** and up to find the best reviewed skills, such as flash briefings from the Harvard Business Review Management Tips.
You can also see new arrivals, with skills from the last 7, 30 or 90 days.
How to Use Alexa Skills
To use an Alexa skill you must first enable it. You can do that from either the app or Amazon’s website. You can also ask Alexa to enable a skill. “Alexa, enable Failed Future Predictions skill.”
[tip] Before noon, say, “Alexa, good morning” to start your day right. [/tip]
Sample Alexa Skills
Twitter Reader
Twitter users can enable the Twitter Reader skill to have Alexa read your timeline, mentions, retweets and Likes. She can also read you trends by location. “Alexa, ask Twitter for trends near Philadelphia.”
After you enable this skill, you need to link your Twitter account to Alexa using the Alexa app on your smartphone.
The Magic Door
The entire family can have fun with Alexa using the Magic Door skill. Say, “Alexa, open the Magic Door” to hear Alexa tell an adventure story, complete with sound effects.
You get to choose the path of the story. Every so often, Alexa stops and asks you to choose the direction the story will take.
The Pianist
The Pianist is a skill to help musicians. Ask Alexa to play a note to help tune a musical instrument.”Alexa, ask the Pianist to play a C.”
The Pianist also can help singers warm up. “Alexa, ask the Pianist to help me warm up.”
My Pregnancy
Expecting a baby? Check out the My Pregnancy from BabyCenter skill that gives you weekly updates about what’s happening with your baby’s growth during your pregnancy.
Get helpful tips and a countdown to your due date. “Alexa, ask My Pregnancy for my weekly update.”
20 Questions
Play a game with Alexa using the 20 Questions skill. Think of an animal, mineral or vegetable and have Alexa guess what you’re thinking of within 20 questions.
Try to stump her and find out if she can read your mind. “Alexa, play Twenty Questions.”
Your Thoughts
Have you found useful Alexa skills? What are some of your favorites? Are there any skills you wish Alexa had?
Share your thoughts in the Comments section below!
I love how Alexa has been evolving. She’s like a real person that keeps on growing and learning new skills. The future has arrived! What Alexa can do is what we have been imagining in the 80s on what lies ahead in the future. Remember the movie Demolition man? This was a movie 23 years ago and some of the things they have imagined then to be a hundred years from now, is no longer far from happening.
Hi Jen, Good point, Alexa really has evolved impressively in two years, both with her skills and with the devices on which she is available.
How interesting that fiction can sometimes predict the future. I also like the skill Failed Future Predictions. We’re not flying around in jetpacks yet, but we may be riding in self-driving cars someday soon!
Hi Carolyn,
Happy Monday 🙂
Informative post! I never knew so much about Alexa! All I knew about was the toolbar most bloggers use on their sites and tend to use it as a mark of blog ranking, which is so different from all that you mentioned. I didn’t know Alexa had so many skills – need to check them all out one by one. I think the Twitter reader sounds interesting indeed, would have a look for sure.
Thanks for sharing it all with us. Have a nice week ahead 🙂
Hi Harleena, Yes, this is very confusing for website owners, especially because Amazon owns both the ranking service and the digital assistant. It must be even more confusing for Amazon employees! I’m wondering if Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has a relative named Alexa. Hmmm…
You’re right, Alexa’s skills are very useful. I have two Echos and I talk to them every day. What is really handy is when I’m writing an article and I need to convert a measurement to metric and I just ask Alexa.
I didn’t know about the Twitter skill until I started researching this article. I like that Alexa can read me the trending topic on Twitter. I check Twitter trends quite a bit to find out what is going on in the world. Now I can do that with Alexa!
Knew that Alexa can do many stuff but never knew that it would do things of next level. Great article, very interesting😀
Hi Chetan, Yes, with over 3200 skills, Alexa is quite powerful. Those skills don’t even include IFTTT skills (If This Then That). I use Alexa with IFTTT to raise and lower the blinds in my home. Very cool!
Exploring Alexa skills used to be challenging, but this new section of Amazon helps you discover her skills much more easily.
Hey Carolyn,
The only thing I knew about Alexa was the rank measuring website. As Harleena has mentioned, I was not aware of these things about Alexa.
The features you have mentioned above are really helpful.
Thanks for the info.
~Ravi
Hi Ravi, Yes, the term “Alexa” can be very confusing, especially for people who run websites. Amazon owns a website called Alexa that ranks websites in popularity. I don’t find that Alexa to be very accurate though as my traffic is doing very well but my Alexa rating isn’t. Alexa doesn’t count mobile visitors, which is now more than half of my traffic.
Anyway, Alexa the digital assistant is quite accurate, so maybe she can teach the other Alexa a thing or two.
Hey Carolyn,
Backlinks is considered as most important part of SEO also we should create more Backlinks to blog or websites and comment to our blog to other popular blogs. doing these things our Alexa ranking increase more faster and also we will get more traffic. Alexa system updates it all website traffic data daily and we can see the changes in our Alexa rank by daily.
The importance of other traffic rank checker or measure of standard such as Google PageRank has been decreased over the time. As we will see there are plenty of good blogs in the web which are getting good traffic and have good content but they don’t get good Alexa rank. Thanks for sharing your significant key with us, they are really looking valuable for bloggers.
With best regards,
Amar kumar
Hi Amar, Thank you for your comment but this article isn’t about Amazon’s Alexa page rank service. This article is about Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant. Amazon has made life confusing, offering two services named Alexa.
Hi carolyn,
I have been using Alexa for a long time. But I was knowing about the features you have shared.
So thanks for the great share.
Hi Robin, That’s great you’re a fan of Alexa too. Yes, it used to be difficult to learn what she could do, but now we have a convenient guide. I hope you discover some new, helpful tricks for Alexa!