Skill Quality Coach

Build higher-quality Alexa skills

Harness the knowledge of machine learning and get personalized recommendations to improve your skills

Skill Quality Coach

Skill Quality Coach (SQC) learns from thousands of Alexa Skills to identify the common attributes of successful skills. It then evaluates your skill against those identified attributes to create a quality improvement plan for your skill. The SQC provides recommended insights, which are personalized and curated recommendations to help you improve Skill Quality Score. Check your score by visiting the analytics dashboard in the developer console.

Know your score

The Skill Quality Coach will also include a Skill Quality Score (SQS). The SQS is a number between 0-5, and is designed to provide a measure of of skill quality. The SQS is calculated based on several aspects of skill design, and measures of implicit and explicit customer feedback. Some of the key aspects of the skill evaluated by the Coach to provide the SQS are:

Rich multimodal & voice responses

High-quality skills leverage rich multi-modal and voice response to engage their customers. With the proliferation of multimodal devices, richness in responses that work across visual and voice modalities, becomes an even more critical element of engaging skill design.

Voice model coverage

High-quality skills have accurate and rich voice models that can easily understand the intention behind a customer utterance. For example, high quality skills not only have enough coverage of customer request patterns but also gracefully handle utterances not supported by the skill by leveraging the AMAZON.FallbackIntent, which enables Alexa to redirect customer requests to the right experience, preventing customer dissatisfaction.

Fresh content & personalization

High-quality skills have sufficient content that is kept up to date to drive sustained long-term engagement. These skills are also able to form deep, meaningful and personalized connections with their customers by understanding their needs and request patterns over time.

Endpoint health

High-quality skills have robust and reliable skill endpoints that provide high utility responses with low latency. An ambient experience is incomplete without a high performing skill endpoint.

Customer experience feedback

The customer experience portion of SQS takes into account customer habituation and customer feedback received through channels such as customer reviews. The customer habituation score measures stickiness of a skill based on how recently and how often customers use the skill. A high score on customer habituation indicates that skill has a higher portion of engaged and repeat customers (fans of your skill) when compared to similar skills. For example: For the two skills in the Games category below, we see that Skill A has greater proportion of customers who are fans of the skill compared to Skill B, which has a lower Customer Habituation score. As Skill A gets more customers, it will be important to retain and engage users to maintain a high customer habituation score.

Skill Developer Accelerator Program

Amazon Alexa also announced the Skill Developer Accelerator Program that provides updated benefits and incentives to custom skill builders for building high-quality skills and growing their business on Alexa. As part of SDAP, we are announcing incentives based on Skill Quality Score for developers who are invested in building high-quality skills on Alexa. This incentive will be available to custom skill developers this year.

Explore more

Find the latest resources, guides, code samples and more to help you build high-quality experiences.

Skill Quality Coach

Harness the knowledge of machine learning and get personalized recommendations to improve your skills

Skill Quality Coach