Amazon's Alexa skills can borrow theirs

Suppose you are using an Alexa skill that is looking for nearby karaoke nights in your city. He finds one in a cozy little bar on the other side of the city. It's perfect.

"Do I have to go ahead and order an Uber?" Alexa asks. You are still in the ability to find karaoke, but that does not matter. You say yes, Alexa orders the Uber and you start getting ready for a catchy rendition of Welcome to the Jungle while you wait for the arrival of your car.

This is the idea behind "Skill Connections", a new feature of Amazon available for anyone developing an Alexa skill. With Connections, developers of one skill can incorporate the functionality of another skill into theirs with only "minimal code changes". The result: karaoke skills that can command Ubers – no Uber skill needed.

Uber is indeed one of three skills that developers can borrow at launch. The other two are OpenTable restaurant reservations and HP voice activated printers. As another example, Amazon indicates that users of the AllRecipes skill can now use this HP connection to print recipes after hearing one that sounds good to them. Amazon adds that Epson and Canon will soon be sharing their own print skills.

There is an obvious interest in sharing the features of your skills. For example, bringing Uber into dozens of new skills will ultimately result in an increasing number of Uber runners. On the Amazon side, Skill Connections will enable the company to consolidate its popular skills into Alexa's almost universal features, making Alexa a more capable and frictionless assistant.

To that end, I'm curious to see how Amazon handles things once you have multiple connection options in a given category. If Lyft follows the example of Uber, will it be the karaoke skills and their loved ones who will choose the carpool connection that they establish? What about users – will they be able to choose the default connections of their choice for each category, or will they just have to take what Alexa gives them? I contacted Amazon and I will update this space if I understand it.

Amazon declares accepting developer applications wishing to share the features of their skills with other developers, and that the community will be kept informed of the evolution of options.

So, in the future, expect more skills to borrow more skills and more skills.