The first skill I created was a fact skill. When I ask my Alexa to open, my daughters name. It will verbally give out a random fact about my daughter, who is currently 4 years old. She was amazed that the Echo knew things about her.
Using the Lambda service. I was able to modify the existing Alexa skill blueprint. Allowing me to create a custom Alexa skill. Since, this was my first time creating a skill. It took me a couple of hours to get everything setup and working. Below is a summary of what I did to create my own skill.
I used the alexa-skill-kit-sdk-factskill, which uses nodejs. Since this was a blueprint, it came with some sample code. I basically changed out the existing facts, and replaced them with facts about my daughter. Once the code is in place, I had to go to developer.amazon.com to actually setup, name the skill and invocation name. Then link it back to my Lambda function. Once everything was setup. I saw my skill automatically added to my Alexa app on my phone. It took me a couple of tries to get the skill to work. I realized I had to use the invocation name, and not the name I called the skill.
I used these 2 articles as a guide:
https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/tutorials/fact-skill-1