Alexa Skills - Developer Voice And Vote
Welcome to the Alexa Skills Feature Request site! This site enables Alexa Skills Developers to request and vote on features you’d like to see in the developer toolset and services for Alexa.
To keep this site purpose-driven and actionable, we moderate requests. Here’s some guidance on how to create great feature requests that can be evaluated by our development teams. For conversation, dialogue or help, you should visit our Alexa forums. We appreciate your input.
-Alexa Skills team
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Persist more than 24kb of data between intents in a session
I'm getting intent failures with no corresponding error messages in logs (using alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-nodejs and Lambda).
In troubleshooting, it looks like I may be exceeding the max allowed size of the JSON Response object. I see from the docs that the total size of your response cannot exceed 24 kilobytes.
I'm using session attributes to store data I need, and in some circumstances that data is larger than 24kb. The same documentation as referenced above says: When returning your response, you can include data you need to persist during the session in the sessionAttributes property. The attributes you provide are then…
21 votes -
Add multi-language compatibility in the same speechOutput phrase
When developing a skill in non-english language (e.g. Spanish), many times our skill needs to speak back to the user with a name or an english native word that doesn't have a local translation or that you want the skill to pronounce correctly in English.
Case 1: Names
"Hola, el nombre del autor es Miles Peter Andrews"
I'd really love if my skill would not butcher the name of that author like it does right now when trying to say that in Spanish mode.
Case 2: Teaching English Skills
"Hoy vamos a aprender voz pasiva. Repite conmigo: The lunch was…
21 votes -
Unique device ID for each Alexa device needed
We have a use case to put Alexa devices into many rooms and write custom Alexa skills to serve different responses and perform database updates based on which room they are in. As a result, we need to uniquely identify each Alexa in order to identify the room. We have look into various work around:
1) use "context:System:device:deviceId" which is specific to each skills and changes when the skills disable/enable.
2) use different userid to identify different Alexa but this would mean having many user accounts if the deployment is big
3) when Skill detects unknown "context:System:device:deviceId", expect user to…20 votes -
Enable opening of browser bookmarks on Echo Show by voice
Being able to launch a bookmark on the Echo Show browsers by voice would bring a whole new functionality to voice interactions on the Echo Show device.
19 votes -
Record Audio files with intents
Would be great to be able to record & handle audio files with Alexa.
For example: "Alexa, start recording", recording.... "Alexa, stop recording" & then we developers would get an audio file of that. That would be a great feature & would give a lot of opportunities for new apps.
Keep voting this up :)
19 votes -
Allow changing of invocation name
Please allow changing/modification of invocation names.
Having to resubmit a new skill and losing the old users is not really acceptable. We should be allowed to be able to change/tweak the invocation name for various reasons:
- Invocation name is not responding correctly (despite successful testing).
- Change of company/business name
19 votes -
Skill sorting in the Developer Console (by recently modified or name)
Please add the ability to sort Skills in the new Developer Console by name or by modification date. The old Developer Console sorted by modification date which allowed developers of many Skills to keep better track of their recent changes.
19 votes -
Add the ability to extend Beta skill test beyond 90 days
It would be wonderful to be able to either set a custom duration for a Beta test of a skill, or to be able to renew a Beta skill test pool without all the users having to click through a new link or email.
19 votes -
Bad debugging
When I get the "There was a problem with the request3d skill's response" reply it would be 1000% more helpful if you would at least display what the response was even if you cannot tell me what was wrong with the response
19 votes -
Widget to run routines
Have widgets to trigger custom or pre-made routines
Instead of saying "Alexa, turn on my lamp" and waking up my roommate, just tap a widget on my phone's home screen (or on Alexa's app home screen) to run this routine.
This to be a shortcut to open Alexa's app > menu > Routines > Run
18 votes -
Respond to query if a light or device is on or off
Alexa, is the back porch light on?
- Yes, would you like for me to turn it off?
- No, would you like for me to turn it on?The same idea or flow for devices
18 votes -
Restart Alexa voice after tapping the Echo Show screen
When a Skill is running on an Echo Show device with a longer text, I want to tap on it to scroll down. When I do this, the Alexa voice stops and the Skill is closed after around 8 to 10 seconds. I also get send to the intro screen.
I would suggest a solution to just pause Alexas voice on the first tap and start it again on the second tap. This will be a much higher user experience.
18 votesThanks a lot for posting this request. Your request has been received.
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Retrieve the PowerState info through the voice
Currently, on Smart Home Skills it is not possible to retrieve the PowerState info through the voice; the only information I noticed that can be retrieved seems to be the status for smart locks and the temperature/setpoint for thermostats...
The power state probably represents one of the most used interfaces for smart devices, and its status retrieval would be very useful for the user: in my opinion it's very limiting to interact by using the voice with a device without knowing if it is powered on or off.17 votes -
Allow phonetic markup in invocation names
When you want to use your employer's brand name as your invocation name, that name is often not a normal English word. This means that the Alexa voice service often can't understand it and the skill can't be triggered.
A workaround is to write a nonsense word that the Alexa voice service can parse as something that sounds like the brand name, but this is not guaranteed to work.
It would be incredibly useful if the invocation name could contain phonetic markup like responses can.
17 votes -
Add Command history to text input
Create a command history. It would be nice that when you hover into the input for typing messages to alexa if you hit the up arrow it will bring you your latest command, a similar feature that you can find in the mac terminal
17 votes -
integrate Alexa dev portal into aws console
While developing alexa skill I have to use 2 different portals (aws console and dev portal). Would be more convenient if I just had one
17 votesThanks a lot for posting this request. Your request has been received
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remove the oauth requirement for SMAPI
You can't use the API outside of a website with the current model. Ex: would like to run Lambda function to update a skill model and then submit for cert. You can't authenticate to use the API in this context.
17 votesThanks a lot for submitting this request. Your request has been received.
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Create widget to access alexa lists
Would like to widget on home screen to access lists
16 votes -
APL Support for smartphones
Hey,
I don't understand why APL is not available on smartphones. Smartphones are able to display simple cards but not to show APL-rendered screens. I understand the difficulty of different screen sizes here but it would be really cool if you could implment APL in your Alexa-App (especially for testing).
16 votes -
Allow new skill session after audio stream has completed
Currently if a user streams audio via the skill there is no friendly way to get back to the skill without the user saying an invocation command.
I'd propose a way to allow a skill to open a new session, allowing speechOutput after the PlaybackNearlyFinished or PlaybackFinished events occur in the AudioPlayer interface.
There are a couple use-cases for this:
1) A podcast skill where it would be beneficially to ask the user if they'd like to listen to the next episode.
2) Give some information about the next episode before it begins to play
3) Provide a purchase opportunity…16 votes
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