Alexa skills can greatly enhance the utility of your Amazon Echo devices.Shutterstock Amazon Alexa skills allow you to customize the artificially intelligent assistant to suit all sorts of needs. You can add new skills to Alexa from the mobile app, a web browser, or even by asking Alexa to add the skill. Here are 15 of the best skills for Amazon Alexa. Visit Insider's Tech Reference library for more stories. Alexa, the voice assistant built into Amazon's family of Echo speakers and smart displays, comes packed with an enormous number of capabilities right out of the box — everything from playing the news to running timers to streaming music.But that's just for starters; Alexa's not-so-secret weapon is the ability to add new skills.