Alexa skills kit interaction from my iOS app

Question

After reading Alexa Skills Kit docs, i have some doubts. What is meant by Alexa-enabled device here?(My custom home automation device support Alexa api or how to change my hardware to support Alexa api?).

This Alexa-enabled device will communicate with Smart Home Skill API and then AWS Lambda Skill adapter communicate with real device.

I am able to create Alexa skills (may be custom skills or Smart Home Skill). How to communicate with this skills from my ios app?

Answer 1

Any device with a microphone, a speaker and a network connection can interact with Alexa.
The developer portal is https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-voice-service A good code base to start with a raspberry pi is https://github.com/alexa/alexa-avs-sample-app

Alexa Voice Service is currently only available in US. We are working hard at making it available for our customers in UK and DE.

Answer 2

I believe it's any device with Alexa Voice Services, which right now would mainly be the Echo and Echo Dot: https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-voice-service/what-is-avs

But in the US you can theoretically Alexa-enable any capable device with a microphone and speaker. It's launching later in the UK and Germany.

Answer 3

There are several Amazon products that qualify as Alexa-enabled. Some of them are the Echo, the Echo Dot, the Fire Tablet, in its latest versions at least, but might be available in older versions through software update, not sure. The Fire TV and the Amazon Tap are also Alexa-enabled.

To your point, only Amazon products are Alexa-enabled. I must say that there is a way to run some sort of SDK, perhaps with Alexa Voice service, and enable a Raspberry Pi or any other capable hardware to act as an Alexa-enabled device.

Of course, that doesn't include the iPhone. To interact with Alexa from your phone, you'd have to create an intermediary backend, be that in a Lambda function or in your own server.