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.

As a developer, I would like a field on an incoming intent request payload that tells me whether that request was the result of a barge-in or not.

Rationale:
Today, there is no way to know whether an incoming intent in a live session was the result of the user completely listening to the previous response, or the result of the user doing a barge-in by invoking their wake word. There are several use cases where this information would be useful, but the two most important are:

1. If you were giving instructions to your user at the end of your response, and they barged in, it is likely that they did not hear the information that you think you gave them. Ergo, you should repeat it at a later time.


2. If users are regularly barging in to your responses for a given interaction, that tells you that your responses are too wordy and probably need to be shortened to provide a better user experience.

Simple voice control of DIY devices could be achieved if the Routines section of the Alexa App had an option to do an HTTP POST.

eg/ I have a home-made lamp (based on an ESP8266) which I currently control using a custom skill that drops the JSON payload to a Linux server which interprets it then does a HTTP POST to the lamp's URL with the required mode as a parameter. ("mode=candles"/"mode=off"/"mode=purple"...etc)

I could (and other hobbiests and educators could) much more easily have implemented this with an Alexa Routine identified by "make it candle time" with a line in the routine which would hike the command over to the lamp's URL without the need for the custom skill or my local server.

The POST option would need to accept a HOST:PORT combination in order to perform appropriate routing to devices once it hits someone's router.

This would open up opportunities for people to implement voice control of custom devices without the need to create a skill, have their own server or implement forwarding in AWS.

Imagine a situation. I have a simple game, which uses states. One state is initial, another one is game state and the last one is the end game state.

I have x amount of intents which are: launch, answer, pass a question, players amount, stop, yes and no intents. I know that these are not all of the required intents, but I want to keep this example short.

Lets say player launches the game. At this state I want user to say how many players he wants to play with. But because game answer intent has a lot of answers in the slot, alexa gets confused and starts matching this intent instead of players intent, which has numbers slot. In this case I have to handle all of the intents, though they might not make sense in the given context. This does not only make coding harder, because you have to cover all of the cases, but also hurts the recognition, because alexa has to determine what was said, between all of the intents.

What would I like is to be able to turn off certain intents at certain stages/states of the game. Lets say on launch I would like, that alexa on user input would be choosing between: stop and players intent. In game state, alexa would be choosing, between: answer intent, pass question and stop intent. And in game end state, alexa would be choosing from stop, yes and no intents.

I think this would help the recognition, because alexa would only have to choose from intents that are used at the certain stage of the skill, instead of choosing from all of the available.

Also it would be easier to code complex skills, because you wouldn't need to handle every intent at the every stage of the game.

This would enable music, dialogue, sfx and background ambiences to start and stop independently and play simultaneously at runtime.

Ideally, some form of looping/ crossfading/ blocking/ ducking would be natively supported as well, though this could potentially be handled on the server or client side if the audio stream was able to be left open at great length.

Some form of this is already built into the Alexa stack as can be observed when Alexa interrupts music being played: In this case music doesn't stop but rather it ducks while TTS audio fires simultaneously.

Exposing this feature to the Skill community would allow for the same amount of real-time, dynamic audio mixing freedom as what exists as a standard feature on the majority of gaming platforms.