Making Money with Alexa Skills – A Developer’s Guide

Book excerpt: This is a book for developers, who not only want to learn how to develop software for Alexa but also want to make money with Alexa. Want to start a side business or a SaaS startup? Just as in the early days of mobile, when fortunes were made with mobile apps on the app store, it is now the perfect time to catch the opportunities offered by voice apps. Amazon Alexa, the voice platform with the broadest adoption, helps developers like you and me, to develop, distribute, market and monetize their Alexa Skills on the Amazon Alexa Store. Want to develop and program Alexa Skills? In this book, you learn step-by-step how to create your first Alexa Skill with the Alexa Developer Console, AWS Lambda, the Alexa CLI, and node.js with the Alexa SDK. Want to scale and grow your Alexa Software Startup? You get a deep-dive into the various ways of making money with Alexa. You learn about the business models for Alexa Skills, marketing and monetizing your Alexa Skill on and off the Alexa Store, opportunities for offering in-skill purchases, and about programming the various purchase and payment flows. Want to build advanced Alexa Skills that users love? The book covers many advanced features of Alexa in plain English, such as account linking, audio streaming, session management and much more. You learn how to personalize your Skill with the user's data and linking the Skill to popular cloud apps, such as Spotify, Google and many more. This will help you create unique apps that stand out on the market and improve the lives of many Alexa users.