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New Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Feature: Audio Streaming in Alexa Skills

August 24, 2016 -- David Isbitski

Before today, the Alexa Skills Kit enabled short audio via SSML audio tags on your skill responses. Today we are excited to announce that we have now added streaming audio support for Alexa skills including playback controls. This means you can easily create skills that playback audio content like podcasts, news stories, and live streams.

New AudioPlayer and PlaybackController interfaces provide directives and requests for streaming audio and monitoring playback progression. With this new feature, your skill can send audio directives to start and stop the playback. The Alexa service can provide your skill with information about the audio playback’s state, such as when the track is nearly finished, or when playback starts and stops. Alexa can also now send requests in response to hardware buttons, such as those on a remote control.

Expanded developer options now allow Alexa Skills to stream audio

Amazon has expanded the feature set available to Alexa Skill developers to include the ability to stream audio. Prior to this additions, developers could only include short audio clips in their Alexa Skills. This was used most commonly for intro sounds and short sound effects within games. The ability to stream audio and control streaming audio playback opens Alexa enabled devices to a new bread of Alexa Skills. Theoretically, a streaming music service could build an Alexa Skill that grants access to the service’s entire library. Prior to this change, streaming services needed to be integrated into Alexa’s default abilities, like when Spotify arrived on the Amazon Echo, but now it will require much less integration.

Live streaming audio is also now supported, so any live content provider, like a radio station, can build a dedicated Alexa Skill for their stream, instead of relying on services like TuneIn to stream their content. Similarly, you can probably expect to see Alexa Skills for individual podcasts released in the coming months. These should provide a better user experience than requesting podcasts from services like iHeartRadio.