Alexa has introduced a Smart Speaker ‘do it yourself’ skills kit for radio stations, reports Steve Ahern.

The kit, introduced earlier this year, gives radio stations more control of how their stream gets to Alexa’s smart speakers and how it is recognised via voice control.

The Radio Skills Kit gives stations the ability to directly “enable a high-quality customer experience in a no-code way” through voice control.

Stations can submit their information to the Alexa Radio Skills Kit Console, which will handle subsequent steps for publishing and discovery. Before the skills kit was introduced, stations had a more complex relationship with the smart speaker company, which, in Australia, was managed initially through CRA and the other industry bodies. Now stations have more direct access, so that they can update and change their information more quickly and easily through the dashboard.

Radio companies can publish new stations by listing metadata, such as station name, alternate names, streaming URL, and station logo artwork and change the details any time they wish.

A variety of names can be loaded into the system so that if listeners ask for the station in different ways, for example, ABC Radio Sydney, or 702Sydney, or ABCSydney, or ABC702, it will recognise any of those names. On the listener side, once the station sets up the range of parameters everything is voice enabled within the listener’s smart speaker.

The kit uses geolocation to determine where the listener’s smart speaker is and will prioritise their local station where possible. For instance, if a listener asks for Triple M and lives in Cairns, the station’s skills data will deliver the feed from FM99.5. If there are copyright restrictions, the stream can be geoblocked.

Changes can take up to 72 hours to ingest and publish to the internet. Each new station is assigned a station ID, which is a unique identifier in the skills kit catalogue.

Smart speakers also present the opportunity for innovative audio advertising activations. The dashboard provides monitoring and analytics.

I use skills routines and alarms on my smart speaker to turn on and off various radio stations that I aircheck around the world. Listeners can do the same to set their wake up alarm to a particular station on any specific day.

In America, about half of National Public Radio (NPR) listeners listen to radio via a digital device, such as a phone or smart speaker. Since NPR introduced its smart speaker stream and a range of skills, such as instant weather updates when the stream is started, listenership on that platform has doubled. NPR also saw a 40% increase in the number of days that listeners came back to engage with their NPR smart speaker skill every month.

To start using the Alexa Radio Skills Kit, make sure you have an Alexa station account and log in here. I found it intuitive and easy to use, except I’m no expert on Longitude and Latitude so I didn’t get that right.

Consultations have now closed on the important issue of Smart Speaker radio prominence in Australia and will be developed into legislation in the next parliamentary sitting next year. This will guarantee protection and prominence for radio stations on smart speakers. In conjunction with the Radio Skills Kit offerings from Amazon Alexa, radio’s future on smart speakers is looking stronger. Other smart speaker manufacturers will need to catch up in this area to match the Alexa offering.

Now that Alexa has got the behind the scenes functionality developed for broadcasters at the back end, it still needs to improve its front end setup interface for users. It’s still not smart enough or intuitive for people who have little patience with setting up electronic equipment. I believe we can expect to see some improvements in this area from Alexa in 2025.

Now that that’s sorted, there’s one more issue for the regulators to tackle next year – car dashboards.

My Apple CarPlay app takes over the screen of my Mazda CX5 when it links to the entertainment system, relegating my AM, FM and DAB+ radio controls to at least two clicks behind the interface. Not good enough Apple and Mazda. This is another area where the Australian Government can take a leadership role, along with the TV prominence legislation and the recently passed Minimum Age Online Safety Legislation. The Smart Speaker Prominence and Car Dashboard Prominence bills are expected to enter the parliament next year. They can’t come soon enough.

Analysis and Opinion by Steve Ahern

To build a music, radio, or podcast skill, take the following steps after logging in to your Amazon Alexa account:

1. Create a skill in the developer console.
2. Create a Lambda function.
3. Implement required features in your Lambda function.
4. Include optional features in your skill.
5. Upload catalogs.
6. Enable the skill for testing.
7. Test the skill in the Alexa app.
8. Provide publishing information.
9. Submit the skill for certification.