Alexa Skill of the Week: Our Groceries

Each week, we take a look at new and important Alexa skills you might want to consider enabling for your Alexa device. Amazon continues to improve Alexa with its own updates, but skills are software components that allow Alexa users to extend functionality across all Alexa-enabled devices in use for very specific functions.

Alexa is available for Amazon devices Echo, Dot, Tap, Fire tablets, and Fire TV, but also on iOS, Android, and the web with Reverb.ai.

This week’s skill: Our Groceries

Description: The Our Groceries Alexa skill is complimented by accompanying apps for iOS and Android. By enabling this skill for Alexa, you can quickly add product items to various lists and then those items are synched automatically to anyone that also has the app installed on their smartphone or device. Our Groceries is a free service. Our Groceries can also be used to tracks recipes, takes photos of items, and scans barcodes.

Real world use: Our Groceries has become an extremely valuable Alexa skill in our house. We have a big family and trying to get everyone’s input on the grocery list a couple times a week was though. This means we miss picking up items sometimes – which ends up in yet another trip to the grocery. By implementing Our Groceries for Alexa, family members can just tell Alexa to add a specific item to a specific list we’ve created. This has actually saved us quite a few trips – and it ensures we don’t forget to add an item to the grocery list because it’s so handy to just tell Alexa to do it for us. As we’re throwing away that empty milk carton, we now just tell Alexa to add milk to the list. Done.

Related:AI Basics: A Quick Reference Guide for IT Professionals

We have our lists segmented by store. For example, we have a Whole Foods list and a Kroger list. Those things we know to pick up from Kroger, we say…

“Alexa, ask Our Groceries to add to Kroger”

Alexa will then confirm and almost immediately the Our Groceries app on the smartphone shows a new item added.

This is absolutely one of those Alexa skill that we’ve been able to implement almost immediately and have continued using with great frequency. Alexa does offer a built-in list capability, but it’s not yet as useful or as robust as Our Groceries.

You can locate Our Groceries Skill in the Amazon Alexa app, or use the following web link: OurGroceries

iOS app: Our Groceries Shopping List

Android app: Our Groceries Shopping List