Wrapping Up

Voice-first applications are not necessarily voice-only. By complementing the spoken response from our skill with visual components, we enhance the experience for our users.

Cards are visual components that appear in the Alexa companion application as well as on the screen of a screen-enabled device such as an Echo Show. Cards are simple in design and limited in how much they can show, but they are equally simple to implement with a call to a single method on the response builder.

Cards are rigid and limited in how much you can customize their design. But in the next chapter, we’re going to look at the Alexa Presentation Language, a much more flexible approach to creating rich visual content for screen-enabled devices.