With Alexa for Business Blueprints, you can create Alexa skills for your business, in minutes, with no code required.
You can choose from dozens of Alexa Blueprints such as Business QA, to help answer commonly asked questions at work or an Onboarding Guide which helps new team members get oriented quickly with location and how-to information.
With Alexa Skill Blueprints you can create a variety of skills that are available exclusively to you on your Amazon account or you can choose to publish those skills to the Alexa Skill Store so that anyone with an Amazon account can enable and use your skill.
Now you can also publish Alexa Skills privately to your organisation using Alexa for Business Blueprints.
To get started, IT administrators can use the Alexa for Business console to invite fellow members of their organisation to create and publish skills for the workplace.
If you are an Alexa for Business Administrator, you can also use the Alexa for Business dashboard to go directly to the Blueprint site to start creating skills.
After you log in with your Amazon account, you’ll be taken to the Business Category where you’ll find templates such as Business QA and Onboard guide. Although you can choose from any of dozens of Blueprints, these two are more business focused.
Select “Make Your Own” and create your skill by filling in the blanks.
If you are a member of an Alexa for Business Organisation and use the link provided by your IT admin and you’ll see a button allowing you to publish your skill, otherwise this will only show the option to publish to the Alexa Skill Store.
If you only see an option that says, “Publish to Skills Store”, you should refer back to the email you received from your IT admin and follow the link in the instructions to Blueprints.
Selecting Publisher Skill will provide an option to publish to Alexa for Business Organisations.
Select Alexa for Business.
Be sure to follow the helpful instructions on these pages.
On the first page you will see an option to set the opening phrase of your skill which is what people will say when they want to use it.
Once you select an opening phrase and save it, you will be able to test the opening phrase on your Alexa enabled devices. This is an important step because once your skill is published you will not be able to change the opening phrase.
Next you can change the name of your skill that appears in the Alexa for Business Console as well as a created by name that identifies you as the skills creator.
On the details page you can upload an icon for your skill or create one using the icon creator tool.
Proceed to add short and detailed descriptions to share what your skill can do.
Next, move on to the Policy step.
Policy allows you to select if your skill was created for kids under the age of 13 or if your skill contains advertising.
When everything is filled out you can review and publish to Alexa for Business.
Within 20 minutes on average your skill should reach the live stage and the visibility of your skill will change from “Just Me” to “Alexa for Business”.
At this stage, your skill is ready to submit to your organisation.
Select “Manage Access” and use the Alexa for Business Organisation Identifier or a RN provided by your IT administrator and then select “Finish”.
Notify your IT administrator of the name of your skill and that it has been submitted and tell them what rooms you would like your skill enabled in, and if you want it to be available to your organisation’s Alexa for Business Enrolled Users.
Your IT admin will then go into the Alexa for Business Console under “Private Skills”, to review and enable the skill for the organisation.
From there, they will add the skill to the rooms that you requested and optionally make your skill available to the companies enrolled users who can then enable the skill using their Alexa app.
As you can see it’s easy to get started creating and publishing a Blueprint Skill for Alexa for Business Organisations.