Alexa skills are the new app store. From 10,000 or so last year, Amazon's third-party skills directory for its Alexa voice assistant is now up to more than 24,000 options as of January 2018.
Third-party skills for Alexa can play local radio stations, unlock your car, order you a taxi, or help you meditate. They can tell you when the next bus is coming, explain how to mix a drink, or read out passages from your favorite book. Even if that book is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Most importantly for a lot of Alexa owners, third-party skills are how you hook into your smart home devices, from Aero to Zoma.
Alexa vs. Google Assistant
The big competing voice assistant, Google Assistant, now has more than 1,800 different Actions, many of which link to third-party services. Although Google has many of Amazon's big-name partners, it doesn't have quite all of them, Lyft being a prime example.
The huge skills library for Alexa helps make up the difference between Amazon and Google Assistant when it comes to free-form queries. Google Assistant is much better than Alexa at digging up info from the web. But Amazon still beats Google when it comes to getting data out of proprietary, third party services—such as calling that Lyft. For more comparisons, check out our story on the Amazon Echo vs. Google Home.
Amazon has a directory of skills on the web, but it goes deep and can be hard to navigate. So we scraped all of the four-star or higher skills on Amazon's site and put them in this handy spreadsheet, which you can look at below or check out on Google Sheets. That's a total of 5,201 skills.
Adding Skills
To add a skill, say, "Alexa, enable X," with X being the skill name. Or, in the Alexa app, tap the menu button, then Skills. Then type the name of the skill into the search box, go to its page, and tap Enable Skill. Some skills will also ask to be linked to an external account, for instance to play music on Spotify.
Most Alexa skills can be launched by saying, "Alexa, open X." That will start a conversation which will guide you through the skill. Once you know what the skill wants, you can often say, "Alexa, ask X to do Y."
Whether you have an Amazon Echo, an Echo Dot, or another Alexa device, adding the right skills can turn your voice assistant into a real friend. For more, check out our list of Best Amazon Alexa Skills, Must-Have Alexa Skills for Your Small Business, or 9 Amusing Skills to Teach Amazon's Alexa. Then dive deep into the list above.