Smart Home Skill Types

Your smart home skill type reflects the capabilities of your device. You implement the smart home interfaces in your skill for the features that your device supports. Most skills implement multiple interfaces to enable voice interaction for multiple features. Some skills use the interfaces available to many kinds of devices, and some skills use interfaces specific to their device type.

Choose the interfaces for your device type

Usually you choose the most specific interface available to model components of your devices, because the more specific the interface, the more natural the utterances are for your user. For example, the user has a smart thermostat, named bedroom thermostat in the Alexa app. If you model the thermostat with the Alexa.ModeController interface, the utterance is "Alexa, set the Thermostat Mode on the Bedroom Thermostat to automatic." If you model the thermostat with the Alexa.ThermostatController interface, the utterance is "Alexa, set the Bedroom Thermostat to automatic.".

For recommendations about what interfaces to implement for common device types, see Smart Home Skill Device Templates.

Interfaces for any device type

Implement the Smart Home Skill APIs appropriate to control your smart home device. Return all supported capabilities in your discovery response.

Skills for specific device types

If you want to build a smart home skill for a specific category of devices, review the following topics:

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Last updated: Jan 26, 2024