I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned).
I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each.
My notes:
- VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device.
- The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong.
- The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations.
- The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress.
- Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use.
- Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc.
- The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon!
- Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not.
- Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills.
- Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary.
There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.
Comments
Former Alexa Skill developer here.
I gave it a shot for a year as a potential source of side income and released about 10 skills publicly (+20 more are half-done or abandoned).
I've learned quite a bit about this platform over the past few years. I'd say the only positives I got out of it are a monthly $50 credit on AWS and sporadic surveys that netted me anywhere from $5 - $50 each.
My notes:
- VUI is a terrible interface. There are too many variables (foreign accents, volume, word recognition, etc.) that just make it clunky and unusable. Testing and debugging in the Alexa Console does not work 100% like on a real device.
- The ISPs (In-Skill-Products) are confusing to developers and users. The documentation is often wrong.
- The Alexa forum posts are rarely addressed by anyone at Amazon. Instead, you start to see fellow developers venting their frustrations.
- The intent model and lack of state machine makes it incredibly difficult to make a skill worth someone paying for it. It wasn't uncommon for testing to work flawlessly and then the published skill would be so spotty as to be unusable. Imagine being in the middle of an Alexa game and then unceremoniously receiving a the default help response (required for Alexa skills) that restarts your progress.
- Alexa doesn't work like people expect it to. Again, the intent/slot paradigm is pretty terrible. There's a lot of grunt work to have it even recognize slight variations of slots, so you end up with a huge list of sample intents users could potentially use.
- Internationalization is a HUGE pain. There are different availabilities for ISPs, Alexa services, etc.
- The Alexa Console is very clunky. Today (just like every day), I loaded the Analytics for one of my skills and got a 500 error. Reloading two or three times usually solves this issue, but c'mon!
- Good luck trying to market your skill. You could game the system by publishing updates or implementing new Alexa features, but getting your skill onto someone's account is basically a guessing game of what will work or not.
- Amazon Skills are not very profitable for individual developers. This puts the platform in jeopardy, as only the big players care enough to have their brand out there and sole developers don't make enough to make useful Alexa skills.
- Other skill developers could just copy your skill and publish it! The certification process is weird and oftentimes seems to be arbitrary.
There's more I could gripe about, but I've abandoned the platform. I suspect that Amazon's real product was the unfettered access to real-world speech data. By having a surveillance device in a user's home, they were able to collect data and train their own software.