The Best Alexa Skills for Amazon Echo Speakers

Virtual assistants are here to stay. Google Assistant, Siri and Alexa have the mission to make our lives easier through compatible devices such as mobile phones or smart speakers and if you are used to using them you may no longer know how to live without them. In the case of Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, you can use it from the Amazon Echo smart speakers and also add some extra features to make the experience much more complete. These functionalities developed and added by third parties are known as Skills. If you are interested in getting the most out of your Echo smart speaker, we recommend that you continue reading.

Best Alexa Skills for Amazon Echo Speakers

What are Alexa Skills?

To understand it in a simple way, Skills are applications such as those of telephones or mobile phones or computers that add extra functionalities to the intelligent assistant and therefore, to the intelligent device in which it operates. Echo speakers have a number of Skills pre-installed, but you can add many more from the Skills store found in the Amazon Alexa mobile and tablet app.

How to install them

To start, the first thing you need is to install the Amazon Alexa application on your Android mobile or on your iPhone for free from the App Store or Google Play. Next you have to log in with your Amazon credentials to be able to use the app. Once you have started the application, click on the icon with the three horizontal stripes located in the lower right margin of the application. This will open a side menu in which you will have all the available options that this offers you and within them is the one that interests us Skills and games “. If you access here you have three options: Discover, Categories and My Skills.

  • Discover: here you can see the highlighted Skills, the ones with the most downloads, and get suggestions related to your tastes.
  • Categories: in this section you can access the different types of Skills that are available (music, children, digital home, news, food and drinks, weather, shopping, etc …) or directly search for them from the search engine by name if you know it.
  • My Skills : here you can see all the ones you have installed.

To activate a skill the procedure is as follows: search for one among the categories or by its name from the “Categories” section and then click on the one you want to install to access its file. Here you will see a summary of its voice command utilities that you can use to activate it. To install the Skill you just have to press the Activate button located at the top of your profile and that’s it, it will install in a matter of seconds and you can start taking advantage of it from your Echo speaker. Keep in mind that when you install a Skill from your mobile phone, all the Alexa assistants that work with your smart devices associated with your Amazon account can use them automatically so you won’t have to install them one by one. Now that you know how to find and install the Skills to use them, let’s see which are some of the best that you can take advantage of

The best skills for Alexa by categories

Children

In this section you have several resources both to entertain the little ones in the house and to spend some fun time with the family.

  • Trivial Pursuit Familia : this is a Skill version of the mythical general culture trivia game. Just by saying “Alexa launches Trivial Pursuit Familia” the assistant will start asking you questions so that you can compete with each other and have a fun time.
  • Pocoyo’s Dreams : This Skill offers a lot of new adventures with music and sound effects in which the game is based on children being the protagonists.
  • Jokes for kids : as its name suggests, this skill will make the little ones in the house have a fun time with a selection of funny jokes adapted to their age.

Exercise

With these Skills you can take advantage of Alexa to act as your personal trainer.

  • Seven-minute workout: If you don’t have time to train, have Alexa lead you through an effective and intense workout that’s just 7 minutes long.
  • My personal trainer: this skill is one of the most downloaded and it is not in vain. It is a very complete function that allows you to obtain a guided training adapted to your physical condition. Also, as you progress, you can level up.
  • Career plan: with this tool you will have a personalized career plan whose objective is to improve your performance little by little.
  • Dynamic yoga: you can practice yoga from scratch by the hand of an experienced teacher who will guide you step by step in each of the postures.

Alexa app

Shopping

If Amazon devices are specialized in something, it is in helping you buy, although in this case we are going to show you third-party skills to buy outside of Amazon

  • Bargain channel : this Skill corresponds to the website that was born from a Telegram channel and that, as its name suggests, will show you the best offers of the moment on a lot of products.
  • Vinoselección : are you a fan of wine? Well, with this tool you can buy wine and also enjoy a personalized experience guided from the screen of your echo speaker.
  • What do I eat? : This Skill gives you ideas for breakfast, lunch or dinner based on different types of diet such as Mediterranean, vegan or vegetarian.
  • Cookpad : if what you want is to have a good amount of homemade recipes on hand with Cookpad you will have access to a lot and you will also be able to follow them step by step.

Movies and cinema

  • SensaCine News : with this function you can get information about the world of cinema and the latest releases.
  • Series Releases : this feature informs you from your Echo speaker about the closest series premieres on Amazon Prime Video.
  • My Recommendations : This skill provides recommendations for movies and series. According to Amazon, it will soon integrate search on platforms such as Netflix or Prime Video.