To help users decide whether a skill should be used it would be great to have a 30 second audio clip with a promo / preview of a skill.

Similar to how the app store has videos or images of apps the user can listen before committing to enabling or invoking the skill.

These clips would surface in three places:

1. On the skills directory page in the Alexa App


2. On the skills directory page in the amazon website


3. As an option to listen to when Alexa recommends a skill

The audio clip would be uploaded / submitted during the submission process as an optional upload item.

These clips could also be videos for multimodal skills.

There aren't good options for linking users to a skill for mobile devices on the web.

• On desktop platforms, it makes sense to link to amazon.com/db/<product id>. The user is likely to be signed-in, and the user can enable to skill in one tap.

However, on mobile web, all of the options are suboptimal:

• On iOS, Linking to the amazon product link first opens the amazon app, and then the amazon app redirects the user to safari where it opens the link. I suspect that most users aren't signed-in on the web browser.




• On iOS, Linking the user to the alexa app only makes sense if the user has the app. I suspect that many users have the amazon app but not the alexa app. If the user doesn't have the app, they open the alexa web app in safari, where they are probably not logged-in.

Recommendations:

• We should link users to the alexa app deeplink


• If the user has the alexa app installed, open the skill there


• If the user doesn't have the alexa app installed, the fallback should be to open the skill in the main Amazon app.


• A deeplink for the skill using the amazon.com link should also open the skill on the Amazon app


• A user should be able to enable a skill from the Amazon app.


• If neither app is installed, make a web landing page that explains how to search and install the skill. Then there should be an option to sign-in on the web.

Additionally:

• We need to see impressions to each of the above


• We need to be able to segment impressions by various UTM params


• We need to see conversion rates to install, and to activation for traffic on these landing pages.

Thank you!
Phillip
Thank you!

Phillip

I have a skill that I recently developed for my niece's 12th birthday. I wrote it as a joke as it displays her picture, tells some trivial facts about her like taking hours to do her homework and ultimately wishes her "Happy Birthday". It is definitely not a skill I would publish to the general public. However, I would like to make it available to my sister's family and a few cousins. Other than the "Beta" feature, there is no way to publish a skill that can be made available to a limited/restricted audience. I have seen quite a few public skills in the store that are would benefit from limited distribution capability since they were obviously developed for use by a small group of family (one in particular that was said to tell you your WiFi password except it was for use by one family and did not tell you YOUR WiFi password. Just there's).

Currently the only way for a developer to respond to a user comment about their Alexa Skill is via comments in the review section.
Now the only people who can comment or otherwise respond to a review are those who have spent a certain amount of money (for the US it is $50) on that particular amazon site. Clearly a developer publishing in multiple languages in different international locales would not have spent enough money in most international locales other their own home, so they can't respond to any comments posted for their international versions. This is a glaring hole and very demoralizing for developers, since often the comments are based on not understanding the skill. Amazon's suggestion was to leave your contact info in the skill description, we did, but still a user's first instinct on running into problems is to leave a bad review.