New Ways to Personalize Your Skill Experience with Alexa Voice Profiles
Today, we are excited to announce that skills incorporating Alexa voice profiles can provide even more personalized experiences by taking advantage of new customer permissions. Last year we announced the skills personalization capability, which lets you leverage Alexa voice profiles in custom skills to tailor an experience to each customer. Customers can create voice profiles through the Alexa companion app or through an Alexa-enabled device with their voice. Now, when a customer’s voice is recognized, you can request customer permission to access certain contact information and further personalize their experience. For example, a game skill can request to incorporate the customer name for a global leaderboard. Further, a food delivery skill can request to send updates on the food delivery status to customers on their mobile number. By leveraging the Person Profile API, you’ll be able to customize the experience for recognized customers in a household and improve your customer experience. To apply to use this feature, please visit our website and fill out the form.
You can already use the Customer Profile API to enhance and personalize your skills. We’re now extending this functionality to skills that incorporate voice profiles. You can configure your skill to request permission to access the following information from the customer’s voice profile:
- Full Name
- Given Name (First Name)
- Mobile Number
When a customer with a recognized voice profile enables a skill that requests to use their contact information, the customer will be prompted in the Alexa app to consent to allow your skill to access their information. When the customer interacts with your skill, Alexa sends an apiAccessToken in addition to the personID to your skills’s back-end logic. The personID and apiAccessToken are strings of characters and numbers, and do not contain any personally identifiable information. You can use the apiAccessToken to call the Person Profile API to access the customer’s profile information. If the customer has not yet granted consent to your skill, you can display a special permissions card to ask for their consent dynamically.
Once a customer grants permission, your skill can request to incorporate contact information for purposes that meet our requirements for protecting customer information. These permissions are disabled by default until a customer enables them. A customer can manage their skill permissions at any time through the Alexa app or at Alexa Privacy Settings and can opt out of skills personalization at any time. If your customer has opted out of skills personalization or if a voice is not recognized, Alexa does not send a personID in the request to your skill and apiAccessToken cannot be used to retrieve the customer’s information from the Person Profile API. As usual, you should plan a fallback experience.
If your skill incorporates personalization through Alexa voice profiles, consider using the Person Profile API to further personalize your skill experience. Developers in the preview will have access to Person Profile API 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 leveraging voice profiles in your skills here. We can’t wait to see what you build!