A Comprehensive List of Alexa Skills

A Comprehensive List of Alexa Skills

Acting as your own personal assistant,  Amazon Alexa allows you to ask a wide range of questions, as well as access an ever-growing number of features using just the sound of your voice. Start using these commands as soon as you set up your Alexa device!

What’s Alexa and What Can It Do?

Alexa is Amazon’s proprietary speech-driven service, similar to what Siri is for the iPhone. 

Commands to the service are known as skills; these capabilities run the gamut from playing a particular song to raising the temperature on your thermostat.

The most popular Alexa-enabled device is Amazon Echo, but the voice service is also available on Fire TV and other select Amazon and third-party products such as the Aristotle baby monitor and LG’s Hub Robot. 

While Alexa can use the thousands and thousands of skills that are available, there are a few things to keep in mind.

  • Not all of these skills were developed by Amazon. Developers have access to write and publish their own skills for Alexa that then become available to users like yourself.
  • Some of these skills may not be worth your time, simply because they aren’t very helpful or enjoyable.
  • Certain skills may require additional hardware (i.e., turning on a light with Alexa)

This shouldn’t scare you away, however. Alexa-enabled devices are great to have in your home and, with a little tweaking, can prove to be very good companions.

I’ve hand-picked some of the most useful and unique Alexa skills from the thousands that are out there. Many of these skills will not be enabled by default, so you may need to follow the proper activation steps before using each one for the first time. 

How to Get Started

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