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Used to work on Alexa. I interpret the response you are getting from Alexa as “The song isn’t available on Amazon Music Free Tier” (or whatever) and not “The so

Used to work on Alexa. I interpret the response you are getting from Alexa as “The song isn’t available on Amazon Music Free Tier” (or whatever) and not “The song isn’t available on Spotify”. Your query gets routed to different backend services based on “intent”, and I’ve noticed that sometimes I have to append “on Spotify” to get my request routed to what I imagine to be the Spotify-interfacing backend rather than the Amazon music one. If you get routed to the Amazon music one, it just checks if the song is eligible for free tier play but doesn’t check Spotify at all. That’s my theory at least, and it kind of maps with the state of Alexa when I left it a couple of years ago. The service that routes based on intent should probably call both music services when the user has not specified a preference and pick the most useful response to send to the customer, and probably does, but for whatever reason I notice this behavior sometimes from Alexa. Tl;dr say “on Spotify” to fix the issue. literally 5 years after I joined Alexa the same bugs and bad ux still happens and is apparently not being prioritized to be fixed despite Alexa being basically useless for anything besides timers, weather, music, and maybe the occasional fact lookup..

throwawayc120 4y ago
I also used to work on this ecosystem, and I agree with this analysis. We regularly found cases where the routing system did not route to the preferred provider, despite the routing system knowing that the user was eligible to play a streamable result on the preferred provider and not on other providers. The experience would dead-end in a way that was invisible to the organization tracking KPIs of the preferred provider, since the playback attempt landed in another org's system, and would penalize the KPIs of the actual destination, even though they couldn't service the request with a playable result. Despite every music service provider being penalized in this way (and providing crappier CX), we were not able to get the Alexa organizations in question to prioritize whatever the investigation and fix required.

throwawayc120 4y ago

I also used to work on this ecosystem, and I agree with this analysis. We regularly found cases where the routing system did not route to the preferred provider, despite the routing system knowing that the user was eligible to play a streamable result on the preferred provider and not on other providers. The experience would dead-end in a way that was invisible to the organization tracking KPIs of the preferred provider, since the playback attempt landed in another org's system, and would penalize the KPIs of the actual destination, even though they couldn't service the request with a playable result. Despite every music service provider being penalized in this way (and providing crappier CX), we were not able to get the Alexa organizations in question to prioritize whatever the investigation and fix required.