Personalizing Alexa for Yourself and Your Family

The Amazon Echo Dot

Many members of our community have learned to use specific Alexa Skills as AT to solve support problems in their lives. But how do we customize skills to exactly fit our needs? Developers have been able to create “skills” or programs for Amazon’s Alexa assistant for some time. What about those of us who don’t have coding chops?

In the Blueprints section of the Alexa development system , the templates (21 right now) are organized as a grid, and using them is as easy as:

1. Pick a Blueprint.
2. Fill in the Blanks.
3. Use the skill you just created.

Many of the Blueprints are focused on family and friend activities. There is also a section of Blueprints for creating stories using various themes. I think that as the number of Blueprints expands, there will be ones that the disability community can use. For example:

There are two themes, one focused on creating information for a sitter, and one for creating information for a pet, that could be easily hijacked to:

• Create basic information for a personal assistant about your needs, red flags, locations of important resources, scheduling important tasks, emergency contact info, specific responses to your emergency reactions, and so on. The skill could be easily adjusted to deal with life changes or the unexpected.
• Create basic information about your service animal, so that their unique needs can be easily reviewed by anyone who has predictable interaction with the animal. When should the dog poop, how often, what food isn’t safe, what behavior is a red flag, and so on?

There is also a Houseguest Blueprint that could be used to orient care staff to where things are in your house, what to watch out for, how your neighborhood is laid out, where stores you use are located and local travel issues.

I would guess that the number of Blueprints will expand, but if you have an Echo and use Alexa for supporting your independence now, you might want to play around with one or more of the current Blueprints to get a feel for them. If you do, you’ll be ready to use Alexa as a more customized AT device when Amazon expands the repertoire of Blueprints.

There is a Help Page with a short video that outlines how to set up a Family Trivia Game. It also contains information about how to make better use of the huge library of existing skills.

Give one of the Blueprints a try, and let us know how it went!