Skip to content
← Alexa Skills - Developer Voice And Vote

How can we improve Alexa Skill development services and tools?

Alexa Skills - Developer Voice And Vote: Interaction Model

Categories

JUMP TO ANOTHER FORUM

(thinking…)

Make Alexa check for intents *inside* the skill before searching for a native/keyword function

It's increasingly common and frustrating to have Alexa ignore intents provided by the skill and instead pivot to a native function / keyword function.

For example, in a cooking skill I've included various intents for calling up the list of recipes offered by the skill. But as soon as Alexa hears the word "recipe", she quits the skill and says, "Sure. I can search by dish name and ingredients. What would you like?"

Alexa obviously did not check my list of intents, because if she did she would've read the list of recipes in my skill to the user.

The same problem exists with any intent that includes the word "list". As soon as Alexa hears the word "list" she assumes the user wants to view their Alexa shopping list---even if there are custom intents in the skill to handle user requests with the word "list" in them.

By default Alexa should always check for a matching intent within the skill first, and only resort to native / keyword functions if she doesn't find a match within the skill.

42 votes

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close

We’ll send you updates on this idea

April Hamilton shared this idea  ·   ·  Report…  ·  Admin →
How important is this to you?

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close

We're glad you're here

Please sign in to leave feedback
Signed in as (Sign out)
Close
Close
Submitting...
An error occurred while saving the comment
  • Anish Sane commented  ·   ·  Report

    I have a similar concern with routines.

    We have a bulb with 2 colors and we can switch between the colors if we power it off and on within a short time.

    So, I created a routine named "change <device name> colors" that performs "power off <device>", "wait 5 seconds", "power on <device>".

    But when I say "change <device> colors", it says "<device> does not support that"; because it checks for Alexa.ColorController interface instead of invoking the routine.

    I feel that user-defined routines should have higher precedence. After all they are the user-made customizations.

  • Corey Cole commented  ·   ·  Report

    I definitely think Amazon needs to do more work on something like this. Some sort of heuristic should be used in finding which skill to invoke, like the most recently invoked skill? Also, when the audio player is playing in our skill, it should try to match an intent in the skill for which the audio player is playing.

  • David Castro commented  ·   ·  Report

    April, this is interesting, I've never seen this happen. Can you give me the name of your skill and the steps you are following to reproduce it?