Announcing Personalized Alexa Skill Experiences (Preview)
Editor’s Note: The personalization feature is now Generally Available (GA) in all locales as of October 31, 2019. Learn more.
Announcing Personalized Alexa Skill Experiences (Preview)
Today, we’re excited to announce skill personalization in the Alexa Skills Kit, a way for you to leverage Alexa voice profiles in your Alexa skills. Customers may create voice profiles through the Alexa companion app, allowing Alexa to recognize their voice on most Alexa-enabled devices. You can now use Alexa voice profiles to create a personalized experience for different users, so your custom skill can address preferences, remember settings, and differentiate between household members. Skill personalization is now available as a developer preview in all locales. Apply for the preview here.
Deliver the Right Response to the Right Customer
When a customer with a voice profile interacts with a compatible skill, Alexa will send that skill a directed identifier, which is a generated string of characters and numbers. Every time that same customer interacts with that same skill on their devices, the same identifier will be shared. The identifier does not contain any personally identifiable information and is different for each voice profile for each skill.
You can use these identifiers to deliver varied responses within the same skill depending on the Alexa voice profiles within an Alexa account. Custom responses can be in the form of personalized greetings or responses based on the likes, dislikes, and interests of each voice profile. If a voice is not recognized, your skill can fall back to the Amazon account preferences represented by the user object in request JSON. Customers who have set up a voice profile can opt out of skills personalization at any time in the Alexa app.
Leverage Personal Account Linking
Today, a customer must configure Alexa Household profiles and manually switch between Amazon accounts to change how a skill behaves. If your skill supports account linking, you may now link to individual voice profiles within an Amazon account and give your skill context based on who is speaking. Alexa will include in the person object an accessToken for the account linked with that Alexa voice profile, and you can use the accessToken to fulfill your skill’s intent through the individual customer’s account. If a voice profile doesn’t have an account linked to your skill the accessToken will represent the default account linked with the Amazon account, so your skill can still fulfill the intent without a personalized response.
Apply for the Preview
Developers in the preview will have access to skill personalization for existing or new skills. You can apply to participate in the preview through this short survey and we’ll notify you if you are selected. Read more about setting up Alexa voice profiles here. We can’t wait to see what you build!