How The CEO of Voiceflow Turned An Interactive Children’s Storybook Into One Of The First No-Code Tools to Build Alexa Skills and Google Actions

I can remember first starting to build Alexa Skills back in 2017–2018, and researching “no-code” tools to do so. At the time, coding Alexa Skills from scratch seemed like such a long journey, that I was even talking with our CTO Joe Wallace about building our own no-code tool (aka Content Management System; aka “WordPress of Voice”) so that we could effectively roll out Voice Apps for clients easier.

What got me excited were a few things. First of all, at the time, as far as I knew, nobody had done it yet. I had found one blog article on Medium.com about “how to build Alexa Skills without coding” and it featured a company called Storyflow. But when I went to Storyflow.com, the no-code tool clearly wasn’t ready for real consumer use yet, which — being in software development — I totally understand.

Well, about a year after I found Storyflow.com, I really wanted to start building Alexa Skills for clients, and for Data Driven Design, and I decided to Google again — “building Alexa Skills without coding.”

Again, the same Medium.com article came up. I opened it, and instantly remembered Storyflow.

That next time, when I clicked on the link, I was redirected to Voiceflow.com, and it was a MUCH improved experience, and not just from a front-facing marketing website perspective, but from a SaaS product…