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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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
22 votes -
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…
22 votes -
Allow the connecting word "und" in German invocation names
If a brand has the connecting word "und" in its name I cannot create a skill with this connection word in the invocation names. This is very disappointing and annoying when you learn about this restriction in the certification process and did not notice it before.
I guess the connection word "und" or "and" in Englisch languages is quite common for brand names. So it will be a big improvement to allow it in the invocation name.
As a background information: I just got a reply from the support that suggested to demand this feature here.
22 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…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 -
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
21 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 :)
20 votes -
alphanumeric slot type
Create an AMAZON.ALPHANUMERIC slot type (although with a better, shorter name!) This would extend the current AMAZON.NUMBER slot type and hopefully improve the recognition model. Discussed in https://forums.developer.amazon.com/questions/4821/how-would-you-design-slots-for-letter-and-number-c.html
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 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…
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 -
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 -
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.
18 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
18 votesThanks a lot for posting this request. Your request has been received
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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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Create widget to access alexa lists
Would like to widget on home screen to access lists
17 votes -
Enable custom slot validation for multi-turn dialogs when using manual delegation to provide a default.
The use case is described in the docs here: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/delegate-dialog-to-alexa.html#default-value-example
The exception being that I'm using a custom slot with validation (entity resolution). If I send a response back with Dialog.Delegate and include the entity resolution in that response, it's ignored by the Alexa service.
A more complete description of the issue with example code can be found here: https://github.com/alexa/alexa-skills-kit-sdk-for-python/issues/85
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 -
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).
17 votes
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