Amazon Alexa skills are about to become much smarter

Amid a flurry of major news for Amazon's Alexa, the company today shared plans to beef up the Alexa Skills Kit with a library of hundreds of built-in commands within the next few weeks. "Intents" are used to understand the most basic commands from users. Earlier this year, Alexa only had 15 intents and slot types -- for commands like "Stop," "Cancel," or city names. Amazon offered few details about the kinds of intents and slot types coming, though Prasad told Backchannel today that people should expect book, video, and local business slot types. The news was announced by Amazon Echo evangelist David Isbitski in a blog post today and addressed by Alexa vice president Rohit Prasad in an Alexa State of the Union address delivered at the AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.