Smart Home Add-on Concepts
Smart home skills are now called smart home add-ons. No action is needed, and your existing integration will continue to operate normally.
Before you implement smart home add-ons, you should understand the components of a smart home add-on and when to use them. Then, review the smart home add-on types that you can build. For details, see Smart Home Add-on Types.
If you're ready to start building your add-on, see Steps to Build Smart Home Add-ons.
In this section
Before you build a smart home add-on, review the following smart home concepts:
- Discovery – How Alexa discovers the customer's smart home devices.
- Device Templates – Recommended sets of interfaces to implement for different types of devices.
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State and Change Reporting – How to include support for state and change reporting to keep Alexa informed about the current state of the device.
- Develop Add-ons for Multiple Languages – Create smart home add-ons for Alexa that respond to customer utterances in different languages.
- Generic Controller Interfaces – General-purpose interfaces that you can use to model different components of a smart home device.
- Real-Time Communications – Enable real-time streaming of audio and video between Alexa and your smart home device.
- Best Practices for the Alexa App – Best practices to support the Alexa app with your smart home add-on.
Related topics
- List of Alexa Interfaces and Supported Languages
- Smart Home APIs
- Add Dash Replenishment
- Smart Home and Video Certification Guide
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Last updated: Nov 25, 2025
