Video version of this tutorial is HERE.

Alexa currently supports 10 different regions/languages:

English (U.S.) English (U.K.) English (Canada) English (Australia) English (India) German Japanese French Italian Spanish (ES)

As you can see there are 5 different English-speaking regions in this list.

But most of the Alexa skills developers just ignore this fact, they’re building only for US and don’t update their skills to work in UK, Canada, Australia and India.

So, today I want to show you guys how to update your Alexa skills built on Storyline to work over all the English-speaking regions.

Let’s start.

Go to the Amazon Developer Portal and sign in there by clicking the “Developer Console” button.

Amazon Developer Portal page.

2. Then go the list of Alexa skills by following this URL.

3. Find the Alexa skill you want to expand to different languages and click “Edit”.

NOTE: If your Alexa skill is already live, you need to click on the arrow button to left of your skill’s avatar, it will expand and there you’ll see the “Development” version of the skill. You need to “Edit” this one instead of the “Live” version.

My Adam Draper bot Alexa Skill (both live and dev versions).

4. Click on the “Add a New Language” button.

Language management on the Alexa Skill page.

5. Select the language you want to add, copy the “Name” and “Invocation Name” from the main language and click “Save”.

Simple 3-step process how to add a new language.

6. Then you need to copy the “Interaction model” from your main skill language, so click on your main skill language tab and go to the “Interaction model” section there.

English (U.S.) language tab on your skill page.

7. It will open open a really huge thing called Alexa Creator, but don’t be frustrated, you just need to click “Code Editor” there.

Alexa Skill Builder beta page.

8. It will open a big text field with a lot of stuff going on there, but all you need is just copy that huge text (Ctrl + A, Ctrl + C) and then click “Skill Information” to go back to the languages selection.

Alexa Code Editor page.

9. Then go to your new language tab (for me it’s English U.K), select the “Interaction Model” at the left side, go to the “Code Editor” and replace all the code there with that one that you’ve copied before. Then Click “Apply Changes” and then “Build Model”. Then you need to wait while model is built (usually around 40 seconds) and then click “Save Model”.

10. Click “Skill Information” to go back to the skill and take a look at what’s missing here. For me it’s only “Publishing information” tab that’s missing, so I just go and fill it out.

English (U.K.) language tab of my Alexa skill.

11. After doing that, all the checkboxes on the left side are green.

Publishing Information tab of my Alexa skill.

12. Scroll down the page and click “Submit for certification” button.

13. You’re done. Usually skills certification for new languages takes about a day.

The process is the same for all the other languages.

NOTE: If you change anything in project on Storyline, interaction model changes too, so you need to do the same process for all the other languages.

Happy creating!