{"id":532,"date":"2020-03-04T14:49:39","date_gmt":"2020-03-04T14:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techministry.blog\/?p=532"},"modified":"2020-03-04T14:49:39","modified_gmt":"2020-03-04T14:49:39","slug":"how-to-create-a-custom-alexa-skill-to-play-church-sermons-on-amazon-echo-devices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/techministry.blog\/?p=532","title":{"rendered":"How to create a custom Alexa Skill to play church sermons on Amazon Echo devices"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are an Amazon household. We buy stuff on Prime all the time. Sometimes, it feels like a daily task! We also really love the Amazon Echo devices and using Alexa for a variety of things. My boys love to ask Alexa to play fart sounds and we use it for music, timers, announcements, phone calls, sound machines at night, you name it.<\/p>\n

One thing I have wanted for a while is the ability to easily play our church’s sermons on the Echo Dots in our house so I can listen while doing other things. In the past, I’ve simply played them from my phone and set up the output with the Echo acting as a bluetooth speaker. That works ok until I walk out of bluetooth range, of course, and it of course means my phone is tied up playing that audio.<\/p>\n

Amazon has made it super easy to create your own Alexa Skills, which are like voice-driven apps. You can enable and disable skills, using the Alexa app, similar to how you install and uninstall apps on your phone. Using Alexa Skills Blueprints<\/a>, creating your own church Alexa app is super easy.<\/p>\n

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The Alexa Blueprints home page.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are a wide variety of blueprints available, which are basically templates to speed up creating your own skill. This is especially great if you don’t want to or don’t know how to write in the programming language yourself to figure it out.<\/p>\n

They have a pre-made template called “Spiritual Talks”.<\/p>\n

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This is the blueprint\/template that makes the process very simple!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

To create your own skill, you will need:<\/strong><\/p>\n