What's New in the Alexa Skills Kit: November 2019 Release Roundup
Editor's Note: Our monthly release roundup series showcases the latest in Alexa Skills Kit developer tools and features that can make your skills easier to manage, simpler to deploy, and more engaging for your customers. Build with these new capabilities to enable your Alexa skills to drive brand or revenue objectives.
In this roundup video we share details about the new things released for skill developers last month, including the Web API for Games, new publishing tools, new speaking styles, and many more releases from November!
You can now control the publishing schedule of your skill with self service skill publishing. This can be especially useful when coordinating your skill’s availability with marketing, back-end deployments, or events. Check out the blog here, or read about it in our tech docs.
With the Alexa Web API for Games, you’ll be able to build for multimodal devices using HTML and web technologies like Canvas 2D, WebAudio, WebGL, JavaScript, and CSS. Read the announcement here.
Starting today, you can monitor your skill’s endpoint latency and endpoint response so that you can stay on top of how your skill is performing right from the Analytics tab of the Alexa Developer Console. Read the announcement here or check out the tech docs here.
Now available on the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) CLI, automated skill distribution lets you give Alexa permission publish qualified live skills to all locales of the same language. For example, when submitting a skill to EN_US you can easily reach customers from EN_CA, EN_MX, EN_UK, EN_IN and others with no additional effort. Read the announcement here. Check out the tech docs here.
Handle unexpected user requests in new locales with the international expansion of the fallbackIntent. Check out the announcement here. Read the tech docs here.
You can now earn money by offering premium content in Alexa skills published in France, Italy, and Spain. Read the blog here.
With the latest enhancements to Alexa Skill Connections, you get more control to create cross-skill experiences in a way you define. You can now create custom tasks (preview) to expose functionality from your skill to other Alexa skill and use direct connections to better controll the skill connections experience. Read the blog here. Check out the tech docs here.
Customers can now use voice to grant your skill permission to create and edit Alexa reminders. Voice permissions for reminders reduce customer friction in granting permission, and thereby increase permission request conversion rates. Read the announcement here. Check out the tech docs here.
You can enable Alexa to respond with either a happy/excited or a disappointed/empathetic tone in the US. Emotional responses are particularly relevant to skills in the gaming and sports categories. Additionally, you can have Alexa respond in a speaking style that is more suited for a specific type of content, starting with news and music. To read the announcement go here. For the tech doc on emotions go here. For the tech doc on speaking styles go here.
Receive input for phone numbers and list selection with the PhoneNumber (Beta) and Ordinal (Beta) built-in slot types, now available in all locales. Read the announcement here. For the tech docs on the PhoneNumber slot type go here. For the tech doc on the Ordinal slot type go here.
You can now save and clone multimodal templates in the APL authoring tool. Read the announcement here. Check out the tech docs here.