Amazon Migrating US Alexa Skills to The UK Store

When new products enter the market, there is usually always a discrepancy as to what is available to the different regions of the world, the Amazon Echo is not an exception, but a recent email doing the rounds shows Amazon is migrating US Alexa skills to the UK store this month.

If you are unfamiliar with Alexa Skills, they are apps you can enable on your device that will allow you to interact with anything from wifi enabled devices, to asking for the days headlines from your favourite news source.

The upcoming migration will massively increase the amount of skills available to the UK market, it is also great news for developers too. Their Skills that are currently on the US store will automatically be copied over to the UK store, meaning they don’t have to spend time creating the Skill for two separate regions, saving money and increasing the amount of people using their Skills.

However, there are some Skills that will not make the migration. For example, any skills that use account linking, such as Smart Home API’s, are being left out. This is because Amazon believe that developers would prefer to provide a more localised and tailored experience for the UK market. These skills may still be manually migrated, but will not make the auto-migration list.

Amazon has set up a FAQ page for developers, which will answer most questions and goes into a little more detail about the process, the how’s and the why’s. The email states:

“To enable you to reach more customers, we plan to migrate your existing US skill(s) to the UK. To do this , we will create an English (UK) variant of your existing English (US) skill by copying over all skill details, endpoint information, publishing information and intent schema. This will make your skill available to US and UK customers in both English (US) and English (UK). You will not receive certification feedback for your skill as part of the migration.”

Do you have Amazon Echo? What do you think of it? What skills do you currently have enabled?