Published: April 14, 2023
Key takeaways
Reminders can make your skill more useful to your customers and increase the likelihood they’ll come back to your skill repeatedly over time ("Retention"). Learn how to help customers discover your skill’s reminders, and how your design should support managing and canceling them.
Need quick advice?
View the Checklist for designing skills with reminders.
In this article:
With a customer’s permission, Alexa can wake up and make an announcement to remind them to do a task. The customer may set a reminder themselves without using a skill, or your skill may offer to set, change, or cancel a reminder on their behalf. This pages covers how your skill can support the latter.
Unlike Alexa Routines, reminders do not launch a skill session into an action, but passively remind the customer to complete an action. Customers may either ask Alexa directly to set a reminder, or, they might ask your skill to set a reminder. You might also want to proactively ask customers if they’d like to set a reminder while they’re visiting your skill.
To learn more about how customers use Alexa reminders, read What are Alexa Reminders?
Checklist for designing a skill with reminders:
▢ Choose a reminder type (one-time or recurring) appropriate to the content of the reminder
▢ Proactively offer to set a reminder for the customer at contextually relevant times
▢ Obtain consent to set each reminder
▢ The customer should be able to use your skill to modify and cancel their reminders with their voice
▢ Clearly restate the time and nature of the reminder message before and after the customer sets it
▢ After the reminder is set, tell the customer how to cancel or modify it
▢ Tell the customer clearly when a reminder has not been set due to an error
▢ Don’t surface too many requests to set a reminder; implement a cooling-off period after a “no”
▢ Don’t include personal customer information in the reminder
Reminders offer another way for your skill to be helpful to customers, and another opportunity for customers to remember and return to your skill. Customers who make skills a part of their daily life through setting reminders engage with them more often and more deeply.
You can learn more about implementing reminders in your skill with the Alexa Reminders Overview.
Reminders should provide value to a customer, such as helping them create a daily meditation habit, making sure they don’t forget an appointment, or reminding them to pay a bill on time. Reminders aren’t for simply reminding the customer to continue using your skill for its own sake.
Your skill can create a one-time, or recurring reminder. You can set a recurring reminder on a weekly basis, or on specific days and times. For example:
Reminder, one-time:
Reminder, recurring:
Specific time, or relative time?
Your skill can create a reminder that has an absolute time, which means it occurs at a specified time, or a reminder with a relative time, which means that it occurs a specified amount of time after another event.
A reminder with absolute time is most helpful for a time that is unlikely to change, and/or the customer can take immediate action on it.
A reminder with relative time would be helpful for a time that could be subject to change, and/or may involve a commute or other delay in action for the customer.
You may even want to offer multiple opportunities for a customer to set a reminder, if it would be helpful for them to do so. Some examples might include…
You won’t be able to customize the speech Alexa reads as the reminder, so you’ll need to label your reminder in a way that fits with the existing schema for Alexa’s response:
In the reminder: “Here's your reminder from MyCapital: Pay credit card bill due today,” the text “Pay credit card bill due today” is the label your will create for your reminder.
Be brief, and lead with the most important information first (learn more about the design principle Be Brief). Alexa reads out the reminder, but they may be cut off on small device screens. (Only about 25 characters appear per reminder on Echo Spot, including spaces).
Do:
Don't:
Be trustworthy, and omit private or protected information. Many of your customers use their Alexa devices in a communal space, and Alexa reads notifications out loud no matter who’s listening. Don’t include personal or sensitive information in your reminder. (Learn more about the design principle Be Trustworthy).
Do:
Don't:
Avoid unsolicited messaging, or messages that could be perceived by customers as unsolicited.
Do:
Don't:
Don’t include the skill name in your reminder to avoid excessive repetition. (Alexa repeats the reminder twice.)
Do:
Don't:
Refer to the customer as "you" and "your," rather than "my."
Do:
Don't:
You can learn more about labeling your reminder with Reminder Label Guidelines in the Alexa Reminders Guidelines for Usage.
Customers can use your skill to set, modify, edit, and delete only the reminders that the skill itself has created. In order to do this, you’ll first need to obtain informed consent to do so. The customer will need to grant your skill a one-time permission to access their reminders, and for each reminder thereafter, your skill will need the customer to confirm each instance of a new, changed, or canceled reminder.
Learn more about implementing permissions for reminders with Voice Permissions for Reminders.
The first time the customer uses your skill to set a reminder…
When your skill offers any additional reminders afterward, it sounds like the following:
Clearly state the time, cadence, and nature of the reminder message that you’re offering to set.
Don’t be vague:
On what day would you expect Alexa to set the above reminder? When do you think she’ll announce it? How would the customer know? State the time, day, and purpose of the reminder both when your skill offers it, and when your skill confirms it’s been set successfully.
Do be clear:
Your skill should also proactively surface an offer for the reminder, asking explicitly to set a reminder with a yes/no question, as the examples above have. Don’t rely on passive messaging, as customers are much less likely to act.
Don't:
Your skill should also respond to a direct request from the customer for a reminder. If they ask to “set a reminder,” they may or may not include all the information you’ll need in that request, so your skill will need to follow up.
When the customer includes all the necessary information…
When the customer omits some of the necessary information, your skill could offer a time that makes contextual sense for the customer…
Your skill will also need to tell the customer when the skill fails to set a reminder due to an error:
To learn more about designing your skill to handle errors, read Natural Speech: Handling Errors Gracefully.
If a customer has declined to set a reminder or grant permissions for your skill to set a reminder, inform them they can set a reminder later.
If it is the first time your skill has asked to set a reminder…
If it’s not the first time your skill has asked to set a reminder…
Don’t pester the customer or ask again too often. Consider some guardrails such as…
Customers will need to be able to make changes to and cancel a reminder using your skill. During their skill session, they might say phrases such as “cancel my reminder,” “change my morning meditation reminder to 11 am,” and more.
In the case of multiple reminders, a customer may want to request, hear about, or manage any one those reminders, so you’ll need to support navigating a list of those reminders. That might sound something like the following…