10 ms·

What Amazon's Alexa economy pays the people building its skills

119 points by bcaulfield 9y ago

foobarbazetc 9y ago
Alexa skills are weird in that Amazon is supposedly selling lots of Echos but our skill has something like 500 active users when our mobile apps are in the 1M+ active range. We have no idea why skill usage is low. It’s a really good skill. The major complaint seems to be having to use our app name to activate it but we have no control over that.
- touristtam 9y ago
  The installation of skills doesn't seems as intuitive as installing an 'App' on your mobile phone, therefore there seems to be a technological barrier.
  - ipedrazas 9y ago
    Yep, the fact that you cannot install a skill from Alexa is a huge barrier. I'm not saying it's difficult, but users are not aware of how to do it.
    - hbosch 9y ago
      Not sure if this is new but I recently installed a skill via voice on Christmas. I'm not usually one to "test" Alexa but I said "Alexa, when is the next Bainbridge Island ferry?" just to see if she could query it. She said, basically, "The Washington Ferry skill can probably help you answer that. Should I install it?" I replied "Yes" and she took a moment to load the skill and then also automatically answer my original question.
      - mulmen 9y ago
        Wait really? That's... actually really cool. I've dismissed this all as a fad and a voice interface to a search engine but that's actually neat.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      hbosch seems to describe the ability to install skills by voice, if that's not what you had in mind is it possible to install a skill that makes installing skills easier?
    - EADGBE 9y ago
      I believe you can "enable skill X" directly from Alexa. https://venturebeat.com/2016/06/28/alexa-skills-voice/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/06/28/alexa-skills-voice/
- Tuna-Fish 9y ago
  > The major complaint seems to be having to use our app name A minor sidenote: Picking a good appname is vastly more important for Alexa than it is for typical mobile apps. It needs to be something people are not ashamed to say out loud.
  - FLUX-YOU 9y ago
    Sidenote-of-sidenote: skill name squatting and selling is probably already a thing
- vidarh 9y ago
  What does it do? I use my Alexa's (3 of them around the house so far) many times a day, but the thing is, there are only so many things I want to speak out loud. It's exacerbated by having to go in "blind" - I'm not going to remember the incantations to get a response out of dozens of skills, so they - including the name - need to fall very close to something I'd naturally say. Overall, I mostly rely on the smart home stuff, basic searches, music, and one extra skill for local travel. I can't see myself opting to use skills over my phone, tablet or laptop for all that many other things. The above is enough to make me enjoy having them accessible everywhere in the house, so I'll probably augment my existing ones with a few Dot's. It also doesn't help that there really is a lot of junk skills around. E.g. finding one that reliably provide bus times near me and that has a sufficiently good interface was a pain. There might very well be other skills out there that do a better job, but I simply don't have time to spend going through it. Good curated collections would help a lot.
  - mjburgess 9y ago
    Remembering the name of my spotify playlists is currently my bug bear. It's very convenient to be wandering around and control music. It quickly becomes more frustrating if you have to go back to the laptop.
  - GVIrish 9y ago
    I think Amazon (or Google) needs to solve the problem of skill discovery. I would love to be able to ask Alexa, "What do you know about X" and it could respond with a list of skills or categories of skills so I could at least know where to look. Even better if I could connect Alexa to a Fire Stick and have it visually display results of a skill search to help me navigate and drill down.
- trey-jones 9y ago
  I think there are a lot of factors at play. I have had an Amazon Tap for about a year, and 99% of the usage is just to play music. And I work in technology. I have used the Alexa app on my phone probably 3-5 times since first setting it up. At that time, I installed a couple of skills: Pandora Jeopardy (which I played often for a while, but then stopped) Some Bed Time story skill, which is awesome and hilarious and I should know what it is so I can recommend it. Nest, which never worked because I guess you have to use Heat/Cool mode on your thermostat which is dumb. I think probably: 1) I installed more skills than the average user on initial setup (expected median: 0) 2) Most users open the app at a similar frequency to me. 3) The primary use of the device for most users is music. 4) Some people don't use them at all after the first week. As far as development of skills, I know at some point they were offering "Amazon Swag (apparel)" in exchange for uploading your first Skill. Come on people, I've got mouths to feed here!
  - justjash 9y ago
    Yep, my usage is about the same. I would say 99% of the time I am just using it to play music and then the other 1% is just asking it simple things like the weather or what time it is. I installed a couple goofy skills but rarely use them. I did set it up with a custom skill to control my Roku by voice, but I don't think I have used it since I got it working.
    - slantyyz 9y ago
      I found it to be a game changer with respect to smart home. Most of my stuff was underutilized, i.e., Nest, Wemo, Harmony Hub. Since I got my Echos, I've accelerated my timeline to put more smart switches throughout the house. My favorite routine with the dark winter mornings is to use a single voice command to turn on my main floor lights and tell me the temperature outside as I groggily take my dogs downstairs to go outside. The temperature announcement lets me know whether my dogs need their coats on. It was especially useful today, as it was -23C this morning.
      - jpablo 9y ago
- wonder_bread 9y ago
  Overall it seems that time spent using skills/apps on Echo devices is a relatively low proportion of the total time spent using the device (relative to the proportion of time people are using apps on their mobile devices, that is). Time could certainly change this, however
mkane848 9y ago
Remind me again why programmers haven't started unionizing and working together more to push back against this kind of shit
bowmessage 9y ago
Why is there a featured picture of a developer posing with a Google Home?
- bob_theslob646 9y ago
  It was a Dev from Ibm who used to develop for Alexa, but with its' unpredictable payouts , he has spent more time on the Google Home platform which allowed him to advertise his books through Google AdSense.
  - bowmessage 9y ago
    Oh, thanks! Couldn't find anything about it in the article.
SwellJoe 9y ago
I wish I was surprised that these platforms are moving more and more toward a sharecropper existence for developers. The mobile app ecosystems for iOS and Android are bad enough; you have very little control, but at least you know the terms when you sign up and if people buy/use your software, you get paid something for it (if you choose to put a price on it). It sounds like for this market, Amazon pays you whenever and whatever they feel like, down to and including "never" and "nothing".
- amelius 9y ago
  Platforms should be utilities. We can't really do without them, and there should not be too many of them for practical reasons. But use them, and we risk giving one or few players all the power. Also platforms give rise to internally regulated markets, and it's one thing if the government regulates a market, but yet another if a company regulates it. I'm guessing we need special economic rules for platforms, or governments should own them.
  - droopyEyelids 9y ago
    One of the worst aspects of this, to me, is when the platform company affords its own apps access to APIs apps from the platform aren't allowed. As an example consider Apple Pay Cash. It grabs anything you send in the messages app with a dollar sign, and converts it to glittery text that prompts you to pay whoever you're talking to. Aside from the question of whether that feature is useful to you, it's such a bullshit, cheating way to undercut Square Cash and Venmo. They're exploiting their position to make an unfair playing ground. Feels so gross to me.
    - SwellJoe 9y ago
      The deck is stacked at every turn, which is dangerous. The sad thing is that I've always had sort of a belief that "more open wins in the end", but that hasn't really been borne out in the mobile space. Apple and Google have built walled gardens where they always have the advantage in any space they want to operate in (even moreso than Microsoft during its rise to dominance, though they're slightly more subtle about how they wield that advantage to kill competitors). It's pretty much a battle of good vs evil all over again, and evil is winning. It's alarming that new markets are even worse. I haven't looked into the voice apps market for alternatives to Alexa, but I assume if Amazon thinks they can get away with acting this way, the rest of them are the same or worse.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
The article mentions my favorite Alexa skill: Jeopardy. It's a testament to how well the hardware + voice recognition works that you can reasonably play through 12 trivia questions daily with only minor hiccups. It's not multiple choice, you just answer with whatever phrase makes sense and it mostly just _works_ (which still strikes me as fairly amazing).
- francisofascii 9y ago
  That sounds much better than the other trivia games I have tried, which have been pretty awful, and reflect poorly on Alexa. They seem to fit a 5 question, multiple choice template.
thisisit 9y ago
Are there any good resources/tutorials for someone who wants to learn how to build these "Amazon skills"/Google Home apps?
- kragubathy 9y ago
  Here's one : https://www.youtube.com/dabblelab https://www.youtube.com/dabblelab Full Disclosure - I work at this company! :)
  - andybak 9y ago
    Any written tutorials? I've never understand the preference for video for coding tutorials. (It's actually the speaking more than the video I dislike. Or rather it's the enforced pacing that time-based media impose on you.)
    - jasonlotito 9y ago
      Some people prefer classrooms rather then books. Videos work like that, except you can speed up or pause the video. You can also easily skip around to the topic that interests you, and you'll easily see how long it takes to learn. Videos also show you how it works and how it's done. Books cannot do that by mere fact that they are static pages. They can describe and have screenshots. Hopefully this gives you a better understanding why some people prefer video over text for everything.
      - andybak 9y ago
        Makes sense. I can't stand classroom learning either.
- mattferderer 9y ago
  AWS has several. Here is an easy one https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-skill-quick-start-tutorial https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-skill-qu...
- 9y ago
mlchild 9y ago
Shameless plug: I’m the co-founder of a company building entertainment & games on Alexa and we’re hiring node.js engineers in SF Bay. We are seed funded and looking to continue growing our user numbers and team, email me if you want to hear more!
- bambax 9y ago
  What ressource would you recommend to get started on building Alexa skills?
  - mlchild 9y ago
    Amazon’s Alexa github has a number of solid tutorials/example code
- djrogers 9y ago
  Honest question - why would you do this? Without any possibility of direct revenue for any skills you build, what’s the motivation? It seems that all you’d be doing is enriching the Alexa ecosystem out of your own pocket.
  - mlchild 9y ago
    There is very much the possibility of direct revenue, stay tuned
laktek 9y ago
If anyone looking to build Alexa skills by converting existing content from websites, you might find https://page.rest https://page.rest useful.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
To be honest skills have no easy monetization path if at all. I’m not even sure skills really need to exist for anything that only uses the Alexa UI. For IOT devices it makes sense . The big issue is that you cant purchase skills and to get to using a skill is time consuming. I made a skill called history facts and I don’t even use it. I never use skills at all.
- slantyyz 9y ago
  Most of our use of Alexa revolves around skills. But they are all around smart home products we have like Wemo, Harmony Hub, etc. The bugbear I have (being a Canadian user) is the region lockouts. A lot of existing skills aren't ticked for English (Canada) support, so we're stuck waiting for skills to show up. I contacted some product companies for some skills I was waiting for, and it didn't even seem like companies were notified of the region setting or the recent Canadian release.
  - chairmanwow 9y ago
    This is a truly unbelievable oversight on Amazon's part. Bad UI is almost certainly to blame for something so silly.
naturalgradient 9y ago
I think developers and really anyone dealing with Amazon needs to understand that there are no 'win-win' business relationships with Amazon. If you win, Amazon will try to take it away from you eventually.
- SteveCoast 9y ago
  I started to build a thing (maybe an OpenAlexa) for this reason (glider5.com) - the goal was to eventually hook it up to STT and TTS and have it answer queries, with all the code being open. Right now it kind of looks like a dysfunctional wolframalpha - but where anyone can write the code to answer queries. Not sure whether to just kill it or do something else with it, but it was a fun idea.
  - aluhut 9y ago
    I've been playing with Mycroft and Jasper before for the purpose of having an assistant running on a PI but I stopped for different reasons. There is a need for a OpenAlexa assistant out there for privacy aware customers. My gf is pretty excited with the stories emerging around her friends who got Alexa. I'm pretty sure this will expand as an assistant becomes normal. But I don't want to have a Amazon employee at home. https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/ https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
- danjoc 9y ago
  AWS seems like a pretty good deal.
EADGBE 9y ago
When I created my skill I created it for myself. The free t-shirt for being one of the first 1000 skills was a bonus. Even though it has a glaring bug, it still gets more traffic than any of my other personal projects. And Amazon (usually once a year around December) offers $100 credit which I can apply to my AWS account for the traffic it incurs (which still costs me nothing).
- EADGBE 9y ago
  Correction, it doesn't have a glaring bug. More people than I imagined are just really bad at music ear training. Aren't reviews just the best?
lkrubner 9y ago
The article says that the Alexa economy is increasingly important to Amazon, yet if you go on the developer boards, most of the complaints from last year are still there. The flaws in the system keep serious developers away. Those on Hacker News might remember this conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 It's also disappointing how much of this system remains vaporware: https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-ces-2016-takeover-smart-home https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-ces-... It's also disappointing that Amazon continues to resist the changes necessary to make the Alexa a good Enterprise eco-system: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-primarily-succeed-in-business-settings-not-in-home-settings http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-pr... On this last point, it is frustrating that we have not seen more competition. Most startups lack the resources to build their own voice system, so they want to build on the back of service being offered by Amazon or Apple or ... Apple promised to open Siri, but so far you can't build Enterprise apps with Siri. There is interest among managers. Among the ideas that business leaders have asked me about: 1. An Amazon Alexa in every hotel room, ready to answer guests questions 2. A salesperson leaves a meeting where they made a sale. They get in their car and drive home. They talk to their ______ device and all of the data is sent to Salesforce, the app creating a new Opportunity or new Tasks. 3. An Amazon Alexa skill that can reach into the companies Salesforce account and generate a report for high level executives Of this last one, we had a working demo in early 2016, but we need some extra tools for specifying the phonetic sound of a company name, as Alexa mangles the names of companies such as IBM and CNET. As to #2, we worked on a text interface for Salesforce in 2015. I wrote about that extensively here: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09... We then investigated how to do this with voice. At the moment, it seems the best option is to use voice-to-text on an iPhone or Android. It's an open question whether it is best to use IBM Watson's NLP tools or build a specialized tool just for dealing with Salesforce.
- callalex 9y ago
  For your Salesforce bridge, have you checked out something like Twilio Understand? It helps you build a back-and-forth conversation and makes it easier to capture user responses as structured/templatised data. https://www.twilio.com/understand https://www.twilio.com/understand
crsv 9y ago
On a side note - navigating and consuming content on cnet's site has to be one of the most painful experiences on the web. Slow and ugly only begin to describe it.
- jayliew 9y ago
  Agreed. I saved the CNET URL to my GetPocket app and then j st read it from there. It cut out all the other bullshit
gridit 9y ago
Wolfram Alpha debuted in 2009. Just imagine what they could have been if they'd opened up "skill" creation to the public. Given that devices equivalent to Alexa or Google Home could pretty much be launched on Kickstarter, is the ecosystem large enough to allow an open-source or more public version of the AI assistant? Is it needed?
- cepth 9y ago
  Wolfram Alpha actually has a pretty significant collection of “widgets” (http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/). These are commonly embedded on math and science related pages. The more clever widgets take full advantage of Wolfram Alpha’s NLP abilities. As to why they didn’t have Alexa-style voice skills, I’m not sure speech recognition is a core competency of the company.
horatiocain 9y ago
Virtually nothing

119 points by bcaulfield 9y ago

Alexa skills are weird in that Amazon is supposedly selling lots of Echos but our skill has something like 500 active users when our mobile apps are in the 1M+ active range. We have no idea why skill usage is low. It’s a really good skill. The major complaint seems to be having to use our app name to activate it but we have no control over that.

touristtam 9y ago
The installation of skills doesn't seems as intuitive as installing an 'App' on your mobile phone, therefore there seems to be a technological barrier.
- ipedrazas 9y ago
  Yep, the fact that you cannot install a skill from Alexa is a huge barrier. I'm not saying it's difficult, but users are not aware of how to do it.
  - hbosch 9y ago
    Not sure if this is new but I recently installed a skill via voice on Christmas. I'm not usually one to "test" Alexa but I said "Alexa, when is the next Bainbridge Island ferry?" just to see if she could query it. She said, basically, "The Washington Ferry skill can probably help you answer that. Should I install it?" I replied "Yes" and she took a moment to load the skill and then also automatically answer my original question.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      Wait really? That's... actually really cool. I've dismissed this all as a fad and a voice interface to a search engine but that's actually neat.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    hbosch seems to describe the ability to install skills by voice, if that's not what you had in mind is it possible to install a skill that makes installing skills easier?
  - EADGBE 9y ago
    I believe you can "enable skill X" directly from Alexa. https://venturebeat.com/2016/06/28/alexa-skills-voice/ https://venturebeat.com/2016/06/28/alexa-skills-voice/
Tuna-Fish 9y ago
> The major complaint seems to be having to use our app name A minor sidenote: Picking a good appname is vastly more important for Alexa than it is for typical mobile apps. It needs to be something people are not ashamed to say out loud.
- FLUX-YOU 9y ago
  Sidenote-of-sidenote: skill name squatting and selling is probably already a thing
vidarh 9y ago
What does it do? I use my Alexa's (3 of them around the house so far) many times a day, but the thing is, there are only so many things I want to speak out loud. It's exacerbated by having to go in "blind" - I'm not going to remember the incantations to get a response out of dozens of skills, so they - including the name - need to fall very close to something I'd naturally say. Overall, I mostly rely on the smart home stuff, basic searches, music, and one extra skill for local travel. I can't see myself opting to use skills over my phone, tablet or laptop for all that many other things. The above is enough to make me enjoy having them accessible everywhere in the house, so I'll probably augment my existing ones with a few Dot's. It also doesn't help that there really is a lot of junk skills around. E.g. finding one that reliably provide bus times near me and that has a sufficiently good interface was a pain. There might very well be other skills out there that do a better job, but I simply don't have time to spend going through it. Good curated collections would help a lot.
- mjburgess 9y ago
  Remembering the name of my spotify playlists is currently my bug bear. It's very convenient to be wandering around and control music. It quickly becomes more frustrating if you have to go back to the laptop.
- GVIrish 9y ago
  I think Amazon (or Google) needs to solve the problem of skill discovery. I would love to be able to ask Alexa, "What do you know about X" and it could respond with a list of skills or categories of skills so I could at least know where to look. Even better if I could connect Alexa to a Fire Stick and have it visually display results of a skill search to help me navigate and drill down.
trey-jones 9y ago
I think there are a lot of factors at play. I have had an Amazon Tap for about a year, and 99% of the usage is just to play music. And I work in technology. I have used the Alexa app on my phone probably 3-5 times since first setting it up. At that time, I installed a couple of skills: Pandora Jeopardy (which I played often for a while, but then stopped) Some Bed Time story skill, which is awesome and hilarious and I should know what it is so I can recommend it. Nest, which never worked because I guess you have to use Heat/Cool mode on your thermostat which is dumb. I think probably: 1) I installed more skills than the average user on initial setup (expected median: 0) 2) Most users open the app at a similar frequency to me. 3) The primary use of the device for most users is music. 4) Some people don't use them at all after the first week. As far as development of skills, I know at some point they were offering "Amazon Swag (apparel)" in exchange for uploading your first Skill. Come on people, I've got mouths to feed here!
- justjash 9y ago
  Yep, my usage is about the same. I would say 99% of the time I am just using it to play music and then the other 1% is just asking it simple things like the weather or what time it is. I installed a couple goofy skills but rarely use them. I did set it up with a custom skill to control my Roku by voice, but I don't think I have used it since I got it working.
  - slantyyz 9y ago
    I found it to be a game changer with respect to smart home. Most of my stuff was underutilized, i.e., Nest, Wemo, Harmony Hub. Since I got my Echos, I've accelerated my timeline to put more smart switches throughout the house. My favorite routine with the dark winter mornings is to use a single voice command to turn on my main floor lights and tell me the temperature outside as I groggily take my dogs downstairs to go outside. The temperature announcement lets me know whether my dogs need their coats on. It was especially useful today, as it was -23C this morning.
    - jpablo 9y ago
wonder_bread 9y ago
Overall it seems that time spent using skills/apps on Echo devices is a relatively low proportion of the total time spent using the device (relative to the proportion of time people are using apps on their mobile devices, that is). Time could certainly change this, however

mkane848 9y ago

Remind me again why programmers haven't started unionizing and working together more to push back against this kind of shit

bowmessage 9y ago

Why is there a featured picture of a developer posing with a Google Home?

bob_theslob646 9y ago
It was a Dev from Ibm who used to develop for Alexa, but with its' unpredictable payouts , he has spent more time on the Google Home platform which allowed him to advertise his books through Google AdSense.
- bowmessage 9y ago
  Oh, thanks! Couldn't find anything about it in the article.

SwellJoe 9y ago

I wish I was surprised that these platforms are moving more and more toward a sharecropper existence for developers. The mobile app ecosystems for iOS and Android are bad enough; you have very little control, but at least you know the terms when you sign up and if people buy/use your software, you get paid something for it (if you choose to put a price on it). It sounds like for this market, Amazon pays you whenever and whatever they feel like, down to and including "never" and "nothing".

amelius 9y ago
Platforms should be utilities. We can't really do without them, and there should not be too many of them for practical reasons. But use them, and we risk giving one or few players all the power. Also platforms give rise to internally regulated markets, and it's one thing if the government regulates a market, but yet another if a company regulates it. I'm guessing we need special economic rules for platforms, or governments should own them.
- droopyEyelids 9y ago
  One of the worst aspects of this, to me, is when the platform company affords its own apps access to APIs apps from the platform aren't allowed. As an example consider Apple Pay Cash. It grabs anything you send in the messages app with a dollar sign, and converts it to glittery text that prompts you to pay whoever you're talking to. Aside from the question of whether that feature is useful to you, it's such a bullshit, cheating way to undercut Square Cash and Venmo. They're exploiting their position to make an unfair playing ground. Feels so gross to me.
  - SwellJoe 9y ago
    The deck is stacked at every turn, which is dangerous. The sad thing is that I've always had sort of a belief that "more open wins in the end", but that hasn't really been borne out in the mobile space. Apple and Google have built walled gardens where they always have the advantage in any space they want to operate in (even moreso than Microsoft during its rise to dominance, though they're slightly more subtle about how they wield that advantage to kill competitors). It's pretty much a battle of good vs evil all over again, and evil is winning. It's alarming that new markets are even worse. I haven't looked into the voice apps market for alternatives to Alexa, but I assume if Amazon thinks they can get away with acting this way, the rest of them are the same or worse.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

The article mentions my favorite Alexa skill: Jeopardy. It's a testament to how well the hardware + voice recognition works that you can reasonably play through 12 trivia questions daily with only minor hiccups. It's not multiple choice, you just answer with whatever phrase makes sense and it mostly just _works_ (which still strikes me as fairly amazing).

francisofascii 9y ago
That sounds much better than the other trivia games I have tried, which have been pretty awful, and reflect poorly on Alexa. They seem to fit a 5 question, multiple choice template.

thisisit 9y ago

Are there any good resources/tutorials for someone who wants to learn how to build these "Amazon skills"/Google Home apps?

kragubathy 9y ago
Here's one : https://www.youtube.com/dabblelab https://www.youtube.com/dabblelab Full Disclosure - I work at this company! :)
- andybak 9y ago
  Any written tutorials? I've never understand the preference for video for coding tutorials. (It's actually the speaking more than the video I dislike. Or rather it's the enforced pacing that time-based media impose on you.)
  - jasonlotito 9y ago
    Some people prefer classrooms rather then books. Videos work like that, except you can speed up or pause the video. You can also easily skip around to the topic that interests you, and you'll easily see how long it takes to learn. Videos also show you how it works and how it's done. Books cannot do that by mere fact that they are static pages. They can describe and have screenshots. Hopefully this gives you a better understanding why some people prefer video over text for everything.
    - andybak 9y ago
      Makes sense. I can't stand classroom learning either.
mattferderer 9y ago
AWS has several. Here is an easy one https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-skill-quick-start-tutorial https://developer.amazon.com/alexa-skills-kit/alexa-skill-qu...
9y ago

mlchild 9y ago

Shameless plug: I’m the co-founder of a company building entertainment & games on Alexa and we’re hiring node.js engineers in SF Bay. We are seed funded and looking to continue growing our user numbers and team, email me if you want to hear more!

bambax 9y ago
What ressource would you recommend to get started on building Alexa skills?
- mlchild 9y ago
  Amazon’s Alexa github has a number of solid tutorials/example code
djrogers 9y ago
Honest question - why would you do this? Without any possibility of direct revenue for any skills you build, what’s the motivation? It seems that all you’d be doing is enriching the Alexa ecosystem out of your own pocket.
- mlchild 9y ago
  There is very much the possibility of direct revenue, stay tuned

laktek 9y ago

If anyone looking to build Alexa skills by converting existing content from websites, you might find https://page.rest https://page.rest useful.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

To be honest skills have no easy monetization path if at all. I’m not even sure skills really need to exist for anything that only uses the Alexa UI. For IOT devices it makes sense . The big issue is that you cant purchase skills and to get to using a skill is time consuming. I made a skill called history facts and I don’t even use it. I never use skills at all.

slantyyz 9y ago
Most of our use of Alexa revolves around skills. But they are all around smart home products we have like Wemo, Harmony Hub, etc. The bugbear I have (being a Canadian user) is the region lockouts. A lot of existing skills aren't ticked for English (Canada) support, so we're stuck waiting for skills to show up. I contacted some product companies for some skills I was waiting for, and it didn't even seem like companies were notified of the region setting or the recent Canadian release.
- chairmanwow 9y ago
  This is a truly unbelievable oversight on Amazon's part. Bad UI is almost certainly to blame for something so silly.

naturalgradient 9y ago

I think developers and really anyone dealing with Amazon needs to understand that there are no 'win-win' business relationships with Amazon. If you win, Amazon will try to take it away from you eventually.

SteveCoast 9y ago
I started to build a thing (maybe an OpenAlexa) for this reason (glider5.com) - the goal was to eventually hook it up to STT and TTS and have it answer queries, with all the code being open. Right now it kind of looks like a dysfunctional wolframalpha - but where anyone can write the code to answer queries. Not sure whether to just kill it or do something else with it, but it was a fun idea.
- aluhut 9y ago
  I've been playing with Mycroft and Jasper before for the purpose of having an assistant running on a PI but I stopped for different reasons. There is a need for a OpenAlexa assistant out there for privacy aware customers. My gf is pretty excited with the stories emerging around her friends who got Alexa. I'm pretty sure this will expand as an assistant becomes normal. But I don't want to have a Amazon employee at home. https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/ https://jasperproject.github.io/ https://jasperproject.github.io/
danjoc 9y ago
AWS seems like a pretty good deal.

EADGBE 9y ago

When I created my skill I created it for myself. The free t-shirt for being one of the first 1000 skills was a bonus. Even though it has a glaring bug, it still gets more traffic than any of my other personal projects. And Amazon (usually once a year around December) offers $100 credit which I can apply to my AWS account for the traffic it incurs (which still costs me nothing).

EADGBE 9y ago
Correction, it doesn't have a glaring bug. More people than I imagined are just really bad at music ear training. Aren't reviews just the best?

lkrubner 9y ago

The article says that the Alexa economy is increasingly important to Amazon, yet if you go on the developer boards, most of the complaints from last year are still there. The flaws in the system keep serious developers away. Those on Hacker News might remember this conversation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409 It's also disappointing how much of this system remains vaporware: https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-ces-2016-takeover-smart-home https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-ces-... It's also disappointing that Amazon continues to resist the changes necessary to make the Alexa a good Enterprise eco-system: http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-primarily-succeed-in-business-settings-not-in-home-settings http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-pr... On this last point, it is frustrating that we have not seen more competition. Most startups lack the resources to build their own voice system, so they want to build on the back of service being offered by Amazon or Apple or ... Apple promised to open Siri, but so far you can't build Enterprise apps with Siri. There is interest among managers. Among the ideas that business leaders have asked me about: 1. An Amazon Alexa in every hotel room, ready to answer guests questions 2. A salesperson leaves a meeting where they made a sale. They get in their car and drive home. They talk to their ______ device and all of the data is sent to Salesforce, the app creating a new Opportunity or new Tasks. 3. An Amazon Alexa skill that can reach into the companies Salesforce account and generate a report for high level executives Of this last one, we had a working demo in early 2016, but we need some extra tools for specifying the phonetic sound of a company name, as Alexa mangles the names of companies such as IBM and CNET. As to #2, we worked on a text interface for Salesforce in 2015. I wrote about that extensively here: https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/0998997617/ https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09... We then investigated how to do this with voice. At the moment, it seems the best option is to use voice-to-text on an iPhone or Android. It's an open question whether it is best to use IBM Watson's NLP tools or build a specialized tool just for dealing with Salesforce.

callalex 9y ago
For your Salesforce bridge, have you checked out something like Twilio Understand? It helps you build a back-and-forth conversation and makes it easier to capture user responses as structured/templatised data. https://www.twilio.com/understand https://www.twilio.com/understand

crsv 9y ago

On a side note - navigating and consuming content on cnet's site has to be one of the most painful experiences on the web. Slow and ugly only begin to describe it.

jayliew 9y ago
Agreed. I saved the CNET URL to my GetPocket app and then j st read it from there. It cut out all the other bullshit

gridit 9y ago

Wolfram Alpha debuted in 2009. Just imagine what they could have been if they'd opened up "skill" creation to the public. Given that devices equivalent to Alexa or Google Home could pretty much be launched on Kickstarter, is the ecosystem large enough to allow an open-source or more public version of the AI assistant? Is it needed?

cepth 9y ago
Wolfram Alpha actually has a pretty significant collection of “widgets” (http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/ http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/). These are commonly embedded on math and science related pages. The more clever widgets take full advantage of Wolfram Alpha’s NLP abilities. As to why they didn’t have Alexa-style voice skills, I’m not sure speech recognition is a core competency of the company.

horatiocain 9y ago

Virtually nothing