One of the weird things about being an Echo, Dot or Tap owner is that Amazon has a habit of rolling out new features and content but never saying a word about it. If you’re a power user, or a reader of this site, you’ll eventually find out about them. Otherwise you may find yourself sitting around wishing Amazon would add features that are already there.
From the beginning, I have been a pretty loud voice about the need for categories in the skills section. I had initially proposed two categories, the first being “Smart home” and the second being “Useless shit.” Over time Amazon did break out the smart home skills into their own group, but the useless shit continued to pile up in a semi-unordered list spanning over 100 pages. If you were looking for a rare gem buried in the useless shit, you would have to sift through page after page of trivia and novelty skills, each good for tens of minutes of fun.
With the new categories feature, you can finally sort the skills into manageable chunks, giving you the opportunity to find skills you may not have known existed without wasting a ton of time. This is a huge leap forward for the skills section and I couldn’t be happier to see it finally in place.