What is this thing?

While the Amazon provided Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) for Java gets the job done, it isn't the easiest API with which to develop. As a throwback to Servlet-style programming, it makes developing and testing your skill more difficult than it needs to be.

Skillz builds on top of the ASK but gives you an annotation-based invocation model that will seem very familiar if you have worked with JAX-WS, JAX-RS, or other modern Java service frameworks. You get to annotate methods on your POJO classes, and Skillz will parse the input coming from Alexa and invoke your methods. Then you can format your results using a more abstracted "View" layer to create SpeechletResponses.