Amazon today released a preview of a new design language & tools to make visually rich Alexa skills for Alexa devices with screens.
The Alexa Presentation Language (APL) enables developers to build interactive voice experiences that include graphics, images, slideshows, and video, & to customize them for different device types. Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV, & select Fire Tablet devices will support skills built using APL next month, as will 3rd-party devices built using the Alexa Smart Screen and TV Device SDK in the coming months. To learn more about building Alexa skills, visit: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit.
Alexa Presentation Language: Purpose-Built for Voice
Amazon said in an official release customers embrace voice because it’s simple, natural, & conversational. When you build a multimodal experience, you combine voice, touch, text, images, graphics, audio, & video in a single user interface, all of which is great for customer service.
APL is designed from the ground up for creating voice-first, visual Alexa skills that adapt to different device types. Included in the Alexa Skills Kit, APL gives you flexible tools & resources to translate voice-first experiences to the screen.
With APL, you can build skills that are:
- Rich: You can build interactive voice-first experiences that include text, graphics, slideshows, &, soon, video Content. You can synchronize on-screen text and images with the associated spoken voice. You can support voice commands as well as touch & remote controls, when available, & take advantage of automatic entity resolution for voice-based selection of on-screen elements.
- Flexible: You can control your user experience by defining where visual elements are placed on-screen, & match the visual expression to your brand guidelines. You can reuse designs to deliver a familiar visual experience across multiple skills, & share your designs with others.
- Adaptable: You can customize experiences to reach customers anywhere, through an expanding range of Alexa devices with screens. The experiences developers create with APL can be tailored according to the unique characteristics of the Alexa device they are being rendered on, & can be targeted to devices with a broad range of memory & processing capabilities.
- Easy: To get started quickly, you can take advantage of Amazon-supplied sample APL documents that are designed to work well across a broad range of different device types. You can use these samples as-is, modify them, or build your own from scratch. Although APL is a new language, it adheres to universally understood styling practices, & the syntax will be familiar to anyone with front-end development experience.
“With the Alexa Presentation Language, you can unleash your creativity and build interactive skills that adapt to the unique characteristics of Alexa Smart Screen devices. We can’t wait to see what you create.” – Nedim Fresko, Vice President, Alexa Devices & Developer Technologies.
APL Components You Can Use to Build
When you design with APL, you create APL documents, which are JSON files sent from your skill to a device. The device evaluates the APL document, imports images & other data as needed, & renders the experience.
In your APL documents, you can use:
- Images, Text, and ScrollViews: You can deliver images & text on-screen, & specify text color, size, & weight for available fonts. You can use ScrollViews to display text that is outside the bounds of the container.
- Pagers and Sequences: You can use Pagers to show a time-ordered sequence of items that typically advance automatically, such as slideshows. Or you can use Sequences to show a continuous list of choices, such as local restaurants, & allow customers to navigate the list via voice or by touch / remote control.
- Layouts and Conditional Expressions: You can use Layouts to group components such as images, text, ScrollViews, pagers, & sequences, as well as describe their placement on screen. You can nest layouts, & take advantage of header, footer, & hint layouts provided by Amazon. You can customize by device type using the when property in your layouts.
- Speech Synchronization and Other Commands: You can send commands that change the audio or visual presentation of the Content of the screen or generate them automatically within your APL documents. For example, you can highlight the line or block of text currently being read using the SpeakItem command & highlightMode.
You can use the new APL authoring tool and test simulator in the Alexa Developer Console to iterate on your designs, visualize how they’ll render, & test interactions.
