We’re excited to announce that you can now make certain updates to your live skill within a few minutes by going through an automated skill publishing process. The new automated certification workflow lets you update your live skill’s slot values and sample utterances within minutes. Quickly updating slot values allows you to get content or model updates to your users on the fly, which can lead to better engagement with your skill. Updating sample utterances is especially useful to map utterances to the right intent if you notice they’ve been mapping to the wrong intent.
A button reading “Update live skill” will be enabled on the developer console upon a successful development build if changes made are limited slot values or sample utterances. You can use publicationMethod as AUTO_PUBLISHING to update your live skill with the ASK Command Line Interface (CLI) or Skill Management APIs (SMAPI)
If you have a skill that has constantly changing slot values like list of movie names in a movie booking skill, list of ingredients in a recipe skill, or a list of answers in a question and answers skill, it is important to push those updates to your live skill as frequently as possible. This ensures the most relevant and timely content for your customers, providing a consistently better experience and a stronger incentive for repeat engagement. The new automated certification process lets you update your live skill quickly and easily to keep content fresh and new for your customers. Visit our technical documentation to find out how to trigger a live-skill update for slot values.
Your skill’s interaction model will sometimes act in ways that you do not expect. For instance, when using Intent History, you may notice that an utterance is mapping to the wrong intent. You can now use the automated certification process to add sample utterances and improve the accuracy of your skill model within minutes. That way, you can minimize delay between when you detect a model issue and when you get that issue fixed for your customers. Visit our technical documentation to find out how to trigger a live-skill update for sample utterances.
We recently announced the launch of reference based catalog management (SMAPI and CLI) for managing custom slots. Using this feature, you can now create slot types that ingest values from an external data source. For example, a recipe skill developer can pull a list of ingredients from their existing catalog instead of having to enter each individual ingredient and keep both data sources in sync. Together with live skill updates, you are now able to push slot value updates from your system of record to your live skill in a matter of minutes. To see a reference based catalog in action, check out our sample code for reference based catalogs available in the Alexa Cookbook on GitHub.
Live skill updates are great for keeping your skill up to date with little delay when you make changes to slots or sample utterances. Visit our technical documentation today to get started.