Amazon.com Inc. is making it easier for companies and content creators to engage consumers via the more than 100 million devices that run Alexa.

The company today released an update for Alexa Skill Blueprints, a feature originally released to let users personalize the voice assistant. It will enable companies to create and publish custom Alexa extensions without writing any code.

Amazon launched Skill Blueprints last year with the aim of allowing ordinary consumers to build their own extensions, or Skills, for their Alexa speakers. The feature provides access to extension templates that can be customized through a drag-and-drop interface. These templates provide the ability to harness Alexa for tasks such as tracking chores and enable users to create interactive voice content.

Until now, Skills built using blueprints were tied to specific accounts. The only way to share them was by manually sending a link to each intended user. Today’s update adds the ability to publish extensions on the Alexa Skills Store and introduces four new templates geared toward organizations.

The first blueprint, Flash Briefing, enables publications and other content creators to create daily or weekly audio newsletters. It’s joined by a blueprint called Blog that’s designed for more frequent content distribution. It uses the Amazon AI plugin for WordPress, a tool powered by Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Polly service, to read out articles from a company’s RSS feed for subscribers. 

The two other new templates have a more niche focus.  University and Spiritual Talks are aimed at academic institutions and religious organizations, offering them the ability to distribute prerecorded or live audio content.

Amazon will likely release additional templates over time to help more businesses engage with people via its voice assistant. Already, the company has more than doubled the number of items in the Skill Blueprints catalog since it launched last year. Lowering the entry barrier for businesses that lack the resources to build their own custom-coded extensions should help Amazon boost the growth of the Alexa Skills Store, which currently features around 80,000 Skills.

Outside developers are a big part of the online retail giant’s strategy in the voice assistant market. They help Amazon address use cases that Alexa’s default feature set doesn’t cover, enabling it to provide a better experience for the rapidly growing number of consumers adopting smart speakers.

Photo: Amazon