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!

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.

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​​

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

If you begin a podcast on one device, then stop it there, move to a different device, it would be really great if you had the ability to resume exactly where you left off, as well as being able to fast forward or rewind in the podcast.

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.

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.

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.

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

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