With the rise of Home Assistant devices like Alexa it’s important that your radio can be available at a voice command. While there are a lot of Home Assistant’s available at the moment - Amazon’s Alexa is the most popular and chances are if you have listeners using a home assistant, Alexa would be it. Considering that Amazon has a lot of devices that use the Alexa Voice Service, having your station be readily streamed through them is a valuable asset for your station.
Android and Apple call programs on their devices as Apps, for Amazon it is called a “Skill”. It activates via a voice command for example - “Alexa play Radio Jazz”, “Alexa run Music 101” or whatever the name of your station is. Here at FastCast4u we are working on integrating your station with Alexa so it will be available with a few voice commands. We will be able to create Skills for you just like we did for Apps on Android and Apple.
So what information would be needed later on?
- Icon / Logo - Once the skills is created it can’t be changed unless Amazon updates their TOS
- Radio Station Name - You would already have this.
- Skill Name - This can be your radio station name. This is what will show on the Alexa Skill store.
- Invocation name - The command used to bring up your station. There are certain requirements from Amazon though.
- Must be longer than one word.
- Abbrevations must be separated with periods and spaces.
- Numbers must be spelled out as well.
Your Skill will be displayed in the Amazon Alexa store and some details will be needed as well.
- Default Language - You’ll need to choose the language that your station will be available in.
- English would still be best as that means your station will be available to the most number of stations.
- Short Description - Up to 140 characters, this is more for a quick read through of what your station is about.
- Long Description - Up to 4000 characters. This will be used for Amazon Skills page and you can describe your station in detail here.
- Permission Document - Needed as either a PDF or image
Once you’ve submitted the details of your Alexa Skill our developer will check if all requirements are met and will work with you in creating your Skill. You do have a voice as well in its creation and our developer will update you as well.
