I want to be able to develop a skill that will do the call of a prayer for Muslim users 5 times a day. I get asked by my users all the time about this and I have to explain that Alexa does not allow it.

The idea is simple,
1. the skill should be able to set up 5 alarms every day with custom sound. The custom sound will be the call of the prayer.
2. The skill has to have the ability to autonomously change the time of those 5 alarms every day without the user interaction.

It is okay if the user has to allow this behaviour in their phone one time at the beginning too.
This feature will make many people buy echo just because of this skill.

Both the Alexa dev console and the ASK Lambda console time out unused sessions -- which is good -- but do not provide any visual indication that this has happened. At least one of these consoles (I don't remember which) compounds that problem by then responding to user requests with 401 errors rather than explaining that the user needs to sign in again.

The better response would be to handle this by popping up a message that the session has timed out and the user needs to log in again.

The best response would be if that popped-up message included the user and password fields, so we could fix the problem right there, without changing the console window's state otherwise. I've found that I can maintain state by using "open in another window" to a link which will cause the login to occur, but the user shouldn't have to guess at server/browser behaviors to achieve that.

There is an extremely low amount of skills that can be used with the Proactive Events API. For Developers that need to send notifications to end users, this is abhorrent. I'm an IOT Developer within local government, looking to send users notifications for garbage and bridge closures, yet none of the schemas are applicable, even the Trash one is limited to a set of options that doesn't accurately convey the required information. This means that developers have to use workarounds, such as the Notify Me skill to be able to send that information to End Users, and also means that End Users have to install a completely separate skill to be able to receive these notifications. This skill, or a similar option in the ASK SDK, should be a simple, easy to use API for any developer to send notifications, yet it hasn't due to Amazon's incompetence and short-sightedness in thinking that the current, extremely limited, Proactive Events API fulfils this basic obligation.

My skill allows pausing an MP3 (eg for a phone call) and then resuming from the point we left off; I capture the offset and then feed it back in with the play request.

If the resume occurs before other Alexa operations are used, this works well.

But if the user has asked Alexa to do other things, those skills may have played their own MP3's. When that happens it can take a painfully long time for Alexa to find its place and resume playing, particularly when the user paused (for example) 45 minutes into an hour-long episode.

I presume this is because only one MP3 is cached in the Alexa hardware at a time, and jumping into the middle of a non-cached MP3 requires decompressing the audio up to the point where you want to resume playing.

Is there anything I, or Amazon, can do to improve this situation, short of breaking each of my programs up into smaller MP3s to set an upper limit on the resume time (which I don't have budget for, and which would conflict with other players' use of this data)?

Failing that, is there any way to determine whether the MP3 is or isn't cached before we start playing it, so we can guess whether we should ask the user to be patient while Alexa searches for the point where it paused?

Or give us the option of playing a sound-effect while it seeks? Tape fast-forward, maybe...

The current behavior, a frustrating silence while waiting to see if the request will work or not, is just not great UI design.

There are two use cases that come to mind:
1. A Skill could be developed that could help tune a musical instrument. The user would specify a note they will play, play it, and then the Skill would tell the user whether the note played was correct, sharp, or flat.
2. A Skill could be developed to tell the user the key in which they are singing. There could be a few well-known songs from which the user would choose to sing, and the Skill would tell the user the key they are singing. This would be great for some of us non-musician karaoke fans!

It'd be great to have a schema allowing the notification to the user that a command requested via a 3p skill has been executed successfully or not. For example

U: "Alexa, ask {my skill} to set the temperature of my oven to 220C and tell me when it's ready to bake"
A: "Ok, I'll send you a notification when the oven is ready"
... several minutes later...
<yellow light>
U: "Alexa, what's new?"
A: "You have one new notification from your oven. The {command} has been executed on {target}"

or

A: "one new notification from your oven. Something went wrong with {command}: please ask {your skill} for more info"

The ideal schema would look like

{
"event": {
"name": "AMAZON.RemoteCommand.Executed",
"payload": {
"remoteCommand": {
"command": "localizedattribute:command",
"target": "localizedattribute:target",
"parameter" : "220 C"
}
}
},
"localizedAttributes": [
{
"locale": "en-US",
"command": "Set Temperature"
},
{
"locale": "en-US",
"target": "your Oven"
},
]
}