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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Enable Individual volumes for Alexa speech and music playback
I just can't understand why this isn't already a feature. Surely others must find the same frustration.
When you are listening to some background music on say volume 1 or 2, and then want to ask Alexa to say something or read something, the volume is too low to be able to hear. I should imagine it is fairly easy to implement seperate volume levels for both Alexa's voice, and music playback?
This is the one and only thing that annoys me about the whole Alexa/Echo experiance. - Thank You!20 votes -
Guest Mode
Say I've got an Alexa device in my guest room. It would be great if there was a kind of "guest mode" which I could use to apply certain (customizable) restrictions to features like:
- Skill invocation
- Smart Home
- Playing music
- Shopping
20 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…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 -
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 -
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 :)
18 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
18 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.
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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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
17 votes -
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 -
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
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 -
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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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.
16 votes -
Make SSML test tool available outside of developer console
Right now, in the test tab for a given skill in the developer console, there's an option to provide some SSML text and hear how Alexa would convert that to speech. This utility uses no contextual information about the skill itself, and there's really no reason at all that it needs to be stuck behind a login gate, other than for the purpose of possibly thwarting abuse of said functionality.
As a developer, I would like the ability to provide this same functionality to my users on a public website I run or to my collaborators in a private tool…
16 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
16 votes -
Support for Font Color in places where Font Size is Supported
Adding the ability to specify a font color in addition to the existing font size would be very helpful. I was developing a test skill for my company an on the prompt I used the company logo as a background image. Unfortunately the logo is on a field of white and the text was invisible since the display font is white with no option to change it. I naively assumed I could put a rich text option <font color="black"> into the text but discovered there is no such option. Just the size. Color setting would be very useful for Cards,…
16 votes -
Add Social Media account linking in the Alexa App for all skills to use
Allow users to link their social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc) in the Alexa App itself. Then allow skills to query which accounts are linked and request permission to use those links, without requiring each skill to perform account linking separately (and perhaps not even exposing the account details to the skill, for greater privacy!).
This would allow a skill to request permission to post to Facebook, for example, to share their new high score. The skill would request this permission at the time of the interaction, and the approval would be delegated to Amazon's built-in handling (to make…
16 votes
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