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 features and tools released for skill developers last month, including the Personal Profile API (preview), ASR Evaluation, and Multi-Capability Skills.
Starting a skill is now easier than ever! Starting today, you can create an Alexa-hosted skill from a public skill template by simply inserting the Git link when creating a new hosted skill. Collaborate, share, and build with this new capability. See the documentation.
Your skill’s interaction model helps Alexa convert your customer’s spoken request to text which is then mapped to an intent and/or slot. With ASR Evaluation, you can now test how Alexa interprets spoken word in the context of your interaction model and address any issues by adding sample utterances or slots to your skill’s intents. Check out the documentation.
With Multi-Capability Skills, you can combine the Smart Home and Custom Skill models into a single skill. Extend the built-in Smart Home skill utterances with your own custom voice interaction model to support nearly any feature, without customers needing to enable and invoke two separate skills. Read the announcement here.
Create even more personalized experiences for recognized customers. You can request information like first name and mobile number to create leaderboard entries, text message notifications, and more! Read our blog and sign up for the preview here.
New Skill Activation metrics let you track the success and error rate of token access and refresh requests. Use these metrics to debug why account linking fails for your skill users. Check out the documentation.