The Scalable Neural Architecture behind Alexa's Ability to Select Skills : Alexa Blogs

Alexa-like voice services traditionally have supported small numbers of well-separated domains, such as calendar or weather. In an effort to extend the capabilities of Alexa, Amazon in 2015 released the Alexa Skills Kit, so third-party developers could add to Alexa's voice-driven capabilities. We refer to new third-party capabilities as skills, and Alexa currently has more than 40,000. Four out of five Alexa customers with an Echo device have used a third-party skill, but we are always looking for ways to make it easier for customers to find and engage with skills. For example, we recently announced we are moving toward skill invocation that doesn't require mentioning a skill by name.