Lesson Notes

• An Amazon Alexa Skill and Marketing your content
  • You Create Content
  • You want your content easy to access by your tribe
  • You want your brand and content to reach new people to expand your tribe
  • Currently users get your blog or podcast by visiting your website.   Users can also find and listen to your podcast directly on your podcast production site or through podcast players.  But for blogs, users must visit your website.
  • Users are starting to use voice controlled speakers for many things that they previously needed to get from their computers or smart phones.
  • Amazon, Google, and Apple are embedding these devices that respond to your verbal commands into all kinds of devices including cars, fridges, conference rooms, and even hotel rooms.
  • As people start to expect to get content by just asking for it, many companies are creating verbal versions of their websites.  In essense, they are creating a new marketing and distribution channel to deliver their content to their existing audience.
  • This verbal interface to your content is called a skill.  It is a special app which give the users smart speaker a new "skill", the ability to understand voice commands and properly send your content to the smart speaker to be read or played.
  • These skills are listed on Amazon.com and in the Alexa skill libarary.  Although users don't need to to go to the skill libarary to use your skill, it is another marketing point for your content.
  • We also list all of the skills on our website to provide another way to advertise your content.

Questions to Answer:

How does it work?

How to use it?

How do I sign up?

What do I need to do to make it work?

What can I do to make my blog posts sound better through Alexa?

How does it work?

• We create an Alexa Skill with your key phrase (called an Invocation Name which is similar to your Domain Name).  We add your logo, blog description, and other specific branding to create your unique voice presence.
• To enable your Alexa Skill (i.e. make it smart), we developed a special application which understands how people interact verbally with blogs.  This Intention Processing application understands the listeners intentions and provides contextual responses.
• We call the "Intention Request Processor" called IRPv3
• Once the Skill and IRP are configured and tested, we submit them to Amazon for certification and publishing on Amazon.com and the Alexa Skill Library

• When an Alexa user, mentions your key phrase (i.e. Invocation Name), the users request is sent to the Intention Request Processor which engages the user and guides her/him through your content.

After it's live, How do I use the skill?

• Just engage the skill by saying:
• Alexa, Start [your key phrase]
• Instead of "Start" you can alternatively use commands like :
  • Ask, Begin, Launch, Load, Open, Play, Resume, Run, Start, Talk to, Tell, Use
• Once the skill has been engaged, the Intention Request Processor will guide the user through content available in your RSS Feed.  The intentions that the IRP can interact with the user on are:
• Read Blog Entry / Play Podcast Episode
• Latest entry
• Latest entry which has not been listened to already
• By specific date
• By episode number
• Find blogs / podcasts
• By word or phrase in the title
• By word or phrase in categories listed in the RSS feed.
• Information about the blog / podcast
• Message from you or information about you
• When a podcast is being played, standard audio commands are available:
• Pause, resume, play, backup, forward
• When a blog is being played:
• Stop
• Question: If somebody is having trouble accessing the skill
• Answer : Before the skill can be used, it needs to be enabled on the device.  When Alexa hears a users request, she is really good at figuring out what skill is needed to handle the request.  If she can identify the skill, she will automatically enable it for the user.  Users can explicitly enable your skill by looking your skill up on Amazon.com and selecting the "Enable" button.  Or looking up your skill in the Alexa App on their cell phone.

How do I sign-up?

• On the CreateMyVoice.com website, select "Sign Me Up"
• Two PayPal options:
• Monthly automatic reoccurring payments.  This requires a PayPal account (either existing or established through the purchase process).
• Yearly manual payments.  This can be done through PayPal, but does not require a PayPal account.  Notifications will be sent out 30 days before the subscription expires to provide time to renew.
• At the end of the sign-up process the following will occur:
  • You will create an account on CreateMyVoice.com.  This will give you access to additional content on CreateMyVoice.com, will give you access to basic statistics regarding the usage of your skill, and collect the additional information needed to complete the setup of your Skill including:
    • Intention Phrase
      • Consider the possible Skill Engagement words: (see above-Ask, Begin, Launch, Load, Open, Play, Resume, Run, Start, Talk to, Tell, Use)
    • Information regarding your Blog / Podcast
    • A message from you or about you
    • You logo in PNG or JPG format.  The image will be cropped to a square image at 512x512 pixels.
    • URL of your RSS feed
  •  

How can I make my Blog Posts sound better?

• Listening to written content means that the listener can't see your text.  This means that somethings that we work to put into a visual format need to be augmented with text to describe what a person seeing the post would understand.
• Lists (bulleted and numbered)
• Tables
• Charts and Graphs
• Images
• Bold / Italics / underline
• Quotes
• Links to additional content
• Abbreviations and symbols
• Ensure you use ',' where you expect a reader to pause.
• Special Pronunciation - can be accommodated (contact us for details).