What Are Amazon Alexa skills? - GoSpeed Hub

Amazon Alexa is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It is integrated into Amazon Echo and Echo Dot smart speakers as well as Echo Show and Echo Spot devices. Alexa's technology allows users to access a wide variety of functionality and information, such as playing music, setting alarms, triggering reminders, streaming podcasts, making to-do lists, playing audiobooks, and updating traffic, weather, sports, and other real-time information, such as local news. Alexa can perform these functions out-of-the-box, usually triggered by a "wake-word" to alert an Alexa-enabled device of a vocal command. Alexa listens for the command and performs the appropriate function, or task, to answer a question or command.