With the world moving towards a connected future, smart living solutions are shaping households and cities of tomorrow across the Middle East. AI is quickly becoming an inalienable companion for humans in the digital age, by assisting people in operating almost every device, be it their phones or smart TVs.

Virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Google Assistant had even started preparing the world for a touch-free experience via voice commands way before the pandemic. Now developers in the Middle East have been empowered by a set of tools to create customised voice applications to control devices via Alexa.

Amazon has rolled out the Alexa Skills Kit for Saudi Arabia and UAE, with a vision to facilitate the evolution of new voice experiences, in addition to Alexa's in-built abilities. Skills are basically the tasks that Amazon's popular digital assistant performs in response to voice commands.

The virtual companion is already programmed for skills like setting alarms, playing songs or reading out the news, but developers can create new ones for specific tasks. The 'skills' created additionally are simply voice driven applications meant to customise the operation of devices controlled via Alexa.

As for the skills kit, it simply offers tools to speed up development of voice experiences by setting up interfaces for speech recognition and language processing. This means that it automatically trains Alexa to hear and understand new voice instructions, and to execute tasks accordingly.

Apart from offering Echo devices powered by Alexa to Emirati and Saudi residents, Amazon will also allow local manufacturers to access the skills kit, for building gadgets that use its digital assistant. Developers can easily design skills for 20 different categories including music, travel, gaming and education, without having a lot of experience.

The conversational applications created on the skills kit for devices including Fire TV and Fire Tab, will be additions to the 10,000 voice-driven tasks that Alexa is already capable of performing.