The idea of Alexa working with WordPress might sound strange if you’re used to using Amazon Echo as a voice command for online shopping or other tasks. However, Alexa is expanding to numerous areas now, including WordPress. This all start thanks to WordPress offering an open-source plug-in called VoiceWP.
Otherwise known as Alexa Skills, the power of speech is now your greatest asset, something that might take some getting used to.
How can you use Alexa Skills to help you with your WordPress site or blog? Take a look at how it works and what the future is of editing your site by voice.
Installing Alexa Skills to Integrate With WordPress
The WordPress REST API is your endpoint here, creating all the voice commands for this unique integration. You can easily create Alexa skills and settings within the WordPress admin dashboard.
Alexa Skills is a great tool if you want to create more personalized experiences for those who might visit your website or blog. Tens of thousands of these skills are now available through Amazon’s Echo devices.
Using these skills helps you make money off your WordPress site by reaching and delighting customers. You can build the particular Alexa skill you need in the cloud through Amazon’s toolkit. Then you can launch your skills through the Alexa Skill Store.
To get started integrating all this to WordPress, you need to install and active Fieldmanager first on github. Then upload the .zip file to WordPress and add it as a new plug-in.
Keep in mind you’ll need WordPress 4.4 to make this work.
Flash Briefings
You’ll be able to enjoy three immediate features from Alexa Skills to help enhance your blog or site on WordPress.
One of the first features you’ll have is Flash Briefings. This is a fairly new Alexa Skills set allowing you to deliver prerecorded audio clips and text-to-speech (TTS) updates. It’s a great way to post popular broadcasters and blogs with audio updates on what’s going on in the news or on your site.
For WordPress, it’s an invaluable tool thanks to easy use of audio clips and text-to-speech content. You can easily use this to update readers about things on your website, or your blog. Even if it’s new content relating to the theme of your site or blog, it helps visitors who don’t have time to literally read.
The News Feature
A centerpiece feature for Alexa’s WordPress integration is the ability to use voice mode for all of your content to visitors. You can set things up where you’ll present a list of posts for users to select at will. The selected post is read in full through Alexa’s familiar voice.
What makes this such a standout is users can do a voice search on your WordPress site for a specific category of content they want.
For full utterances and intent schema, you can easily cut and paste directly into the Amazon Developer console for customization. Using this is going to matter if you want Alexa to properly pronounce certain words or acronyms. Despite Alexa being smart, we still have to tell AI how to speak our own content to make it accurate.
The Facts and Quotes Feature
It’s possible to serve up favorite quotes or facts related to your industry on your WordPress blog. You can add a whole other dimension to your site or blog by doing this, including keeping visitors in the loop about certain types of information they’d find useful.
As an add-on, you can even create custom images with this to enhance your site’s content. It’s possible to make this a subset of functionality for the News feature above.
If you have a development team behind your WordPress site, they can add a lot of customized features using hooks, filters, and functions. You’ll want to refer to the github documentation on how to go about this to give your site a unique edge.
Using Blog Helper to Create Content On Your Blog
One popular custom Alexa Skill created by Christopher Finke is called Blog Helper. Through this open-source Alexa Skill, you’re able to check on WordPress notifications, moderate comments, and dictate blog ideas as drafts.
Finke’s creation is just one example of how you can create an Alexa Skill on your own and offer it as an open-source project. Blog Helper was the result of experimentation about how Alexa could make tasks easier when managing WordPress content.
While you’ll need to ask Alexa to enable Blog Helper first, it’s easy to integrate it with WordPress. Then select the blog you want the program to access so you can start managing things you create.
Once you’re set up, you can ask Alexa to read off your notifications about your blog. She’ll also read all blog comments for you while letting you moderate them through your own voice commands.
Most impressive here is being able to dictate WordPress blog drafts to Alexa. The program will save your drafts so you can go back to it later. It’s a glimpse into the future on how we may all create blogs into the coming decade.
Bringing Alexa to WordPress Sites Big and Small
Tech media continues to cover the Alexa/WordPress integration capability, and they note it covers more than just small, obscure blogs.
Considering WordPress now powers up to 30% of all web content, you can see how much the Alexa integration will help even big companies. Many large news and entertainment companies use WordPress for their websites. Giving them opportunity to integrate Alexa into creating and managing content will cut down on time for media creators.
There isn’t anything more stressful than content creators needing to meet deadlines. Through Alexa, it’s possible to moderate content and create content while on the go. Yes, this means even being able to dictate content while driving to work, despite Alexa possibly becoming a new driving distraction.
Visit us at Ndevr to learn about our expertise in building web platforms for major digital media companies. We can help incorporate the above Alexa/WordPress integration for your website.
