Amazon’s Alexa is getting smarter in Canada now that the online retail giant has added ‘Skills Blueprints’ to the Canadian version of Alexa’s arsenal.
Skills Blueprints are pre-made templates that allow the user to add custom commands and responses to Alexa’s knowledge pool.
There are 35 blueprints, ranging from loading Alexa with tips for your babysitter to making the voice-activated assistant launch insults at your friends.
To create a Skills Blueprint, all you need to do is visit blueprints.amazon.ca and select the outline you want to create.
Once you’ve decided on a Skill, you then fill in the answers to the commands. For the ‘Petsitter Skill,’ users need to fill in the solution to questions like, “what’s my pet’s morning routine?,” including special notes about the pet and where the food is kept.
Users need to get used to saying phrases like, “Alexa, Open my Petsitter” to initiate the custom-made skills.
This doesn’t give users an unlimited amount of freedom since they can only supply the answers and not the questions. That said, it does open up a lot of doors that were previously closed for Alexa in Canada.
The only issue is it will be hard for the people that don’t set up the Skill to learn the commands since they’re not part of the default Alexa skillset. Either way, this is a really refreshing feature and getting a digital assistant to yell insults at people will never stop being funny.
Source: Amazon
