Though Alexa does not work ideally and supports a few languages yet, but anyway it looks fantastic and has a great potential.
Thanks to various applications available for Alexa Echo, it can work as a radio, alarm, timer, calendar, play music from streaming services, read books and it can be integrated into smart home systems.
If a necessary function is not found - not a problem! You can find the right one in special Amazon applications base - Alexa Skills store. There are about 20k free skills available. It is open and any developer can publish his own skill there.
Our team has also created and successfully published Alexa skills in the store. One of them helps to track insurance certificate status, road traffic, current and future payment in different services, etc.
Development was based on Node.js as this framework works well with high loads of data traffic. And Lambda function lets not worry about scaling during them.
Talking about Alexa Skills development, Node.js is a good fit because it has a huge amount of various modules, standard and external libraries, which provide powerful capabilities when building an application and allows to work out necessary functions for it.
Using Node also defined the choice of data interchange format - JSON. It is compact, easy to use and also works perfectly with Javascript based framework.
With growing popularity of Alexa and other voice assistants development is also becoming more popular in this field and new applications for them appears every day.
