Alexa is the cloud-based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, a new category of device designed around your voice. Today, Amazon announced the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK), a collection of self-service APIs and tools that make it fast and easy for developers to create new voice-driven capabilities for Alexa. With a few lines of code, developers can easily integrate existing web services with Alexa or, in just a few hours, they can build entirely new experiences designed around voice. No experience with speech recognition or natural language understanding is required—Amazon does all the work to hear, understand, and process the customer’s spoken request so a developer doesn’t have to.
https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-skills-kit