Introducing the Alexa Audio Encoding Tool

The alexa ecosystem allows developers to play back audio in two unique ways.

The first is to leverage the Amazon audio player. This is ideal for when you want to play a whole song, think Spotify skill, but the challenge is that you are turning control over to the audio player. Once you hand over control it's no longer possible to mix spoken text with your audio files.

The other way is to mix audio files into your SSML (Speech Synthesis Markup Language). The catch here is that Amazon is very particular about the format of these audio files. Their recommendation is to install a program called ffmpeg. While that's fine for developers, it's pretty intimidating for the editors creating content for these skills. For this reason we created the Alexa Audio Encoding Tool.

The tool we created is a lightweight page where content editors can upload their audio files, we'll ensure it meets Amazon's requirements for length, then encode it into the appropriate bitrate and download it back to your computer. This is a simple, free and easy-to-use tool that solves this workflow issue. Hope you enjoy it!

If you have any suggestions or feedback shoot us a note at alexa@rocketinsights.com.