Voice apps offer a few distinct advantages over keyboards.

First and foremost, they’re quicker, easier and more natural to use. Human beings normally speak at a rate of about 150 words per minute. Unless you have ten fingers on each hand, you probably don’t type that fast. Voice assistants speed up the process of getting the information you need, when you need it.

The usefulness of voice apps extends beyond simple efficiency though.

There are a lot of situations in which using a phone might not be convenient. Maybe you need to access a recipe while you’re cooking, or maybe you want to browse relaxing soundscapes while you’re in the bath. Neither situation would be very conducive to using a mobile or a keyboard, and there are many more like them.

If you want to leverage the power of voice apps to drive sales for your own business, a good place to start is by using voice to solve problems like these, where traditional typed searches miss the mark.

A skill is simply a voice app for Amazon’s Alexa, which can be accessed through an Echo or other enabled device.

You might also have heard of Google Actions, which are voice apps for Google Assistant.

The reason we work primarily with skills is that Alexa is the most popular voice assistant, with about 70% market share as of December 2019. The bottom line is that skills cater to a wider user base, and therefore a wider pool of possible customers.

With that being said, we can and do build Google Actions and voice apps for other platforms, often including them as optional extras with an Alexa skills package. There’s no disadvantage to having your app available on more platforms – many clients just prefer to go for the biggest target.

You certainly can.

There are a couple of approaches you can take to monetising your Alexa skills.

Your first option is in-skill purchasing, which is a lot like the “freemium” model that most popular mobile apps use. This means charging users to unlock additional features. For example, if you have a quiz skill, you might offer users the option to purchase a certain number of extra quizzes per day.

As a rule of thumb though, the more lucrative option is to create a quality skill that people engage with, and then to promote your products through that skill. All that’s required is that your site accepts Amazon Pay, which is easy to set up if you don’t already have it configured.

This can be a powerful way to drive sales. Once Amazon Pay is set up, your users will be able to use their existing payment details to say “Alexa, order me one of these.” It’s that simple.

This is as broad a question as “how much does it cost to build a mobile app?”

Different skills have different functionalities. If you want to build a complex, multi-layered skill that integrates with and manipulates data from several APIs, it’s going to require a greater investment than putting together a simple quiz.

All of our quotes are no-obligation, and we don’t hard-sell, so why not drop us a line and tell us exactly what you’re looking for?

As with the price, it depends what you want the skill to do.

In our experience, 9 out of 10 skills can be built within a 4-week turnaround, but we’ve taken projects from design to completion in less than a week where the specifications were straightforward.

As of December 2019, about 50 million worldwide.

With about 25 million customers using their voice assistants daily, and half of those users making voice purchases, that’s a lot of money you’re leaving on the table if your business doesn’t have a voice presence.

It’s also the reason that skills are the focus of what we do as an agency. With traditional advertising platforms now as saturated as they are (and with 50% of all internet searches predicted to be done through voice this year), having a voice strategy is fast becoming as important as having a social media strategy.