Apply for the Alexa Skill PIN Confirmation Developer Preview

Geir Olsen Nov 24, 2020
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At Alexa Live in July, we announced a new Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) feature that enables you limit access to some skill functionality by requiring customers to enter a 4-digit pin. With PIN confirmation (preview), you can verify which customer is accessing your Alexa skill by confirming their voice matches to an Alexa Profile and prompting them to say their Alexa profile PIN. You can use PIN confirmation (preview) to satisfy the skill certification requirements for in-skill purchases and to enable customers to control access to their personal information from your skill. Today, we’re excited to make the documentation for PIN confirmation (preview) available to all developers. We also encourage all developers who use personalization and account linking to apply for the preview. You can begin building with the feature once you are accepted into the preview.

Enhance Your Skills that Support Personalization and Account Linking

You can now add PIN confirmation (preview) to your US English skills that support Personalization and Account Linking. Personalization makes it easier for multiple users in a household to share Alexa devices by enabling each user with a voice profile to link skills to their personal third party accounts. When multiple users have linked their personal accounts for your skill, Alexa can recognize the speaker and use the correct personal account based on who is speaking to Alexa. This eliminates the requirement for users to say, “Alexa, switch accounts.” When Alexa doesn’t recognize the voice being used within a personalized skill, or the voice profile recognized doesn’t have an associated account linked for the skill, the shared linked account is used as a fallback for the request.

With PIN confirmation (preview), you can provide an additional layer of protection for your personalized skill interactions. When a customer makes a voice request in your skill, you can ask them to verify their identity by repeating their profile PIN. For example, as shown in this hypothetical interaction with a personalized skill called Grocery Buddy, you can require a user to provide their PIN before completing purchases greater than $100:

Izumi: “Alexa, ask Grocery Buddy to add a five pound bag of russet potatoes.”
Alexa: “Hi, Izumi. Welcome back to Grocery Buddy. I’ve added one five-pound bag of russet potatoes to your cart. Add more items or say ‘checkout’ when you’re ready.”
Izumi: “Checkout”
Alexa: “Your cart has twenty items totaling $105.94 and will be ready to pickup in about an hour. Complete the order?”
Izumi:“Yes”
Alexa:“What’s your Profile PIN?”
Izumi: “two, four, eight, six”
Alexa: “Order placed. It’ll be ready for pick up after 3:27pm.”

Easy Configuration for Customers

Customers manage PIN confirmation (preview) on the settings page of your skill in the Alexa app. You can make PIN confirmation (preview) mandatory or optional. With mandatory PIN confirmation (preview), your customers will be required to set-up a 4-digit PIN through their Alexa app during skill enablement after account linking the skill’s 3rd party account. With optional PIN confirmation (preview), the Alexa account owner can choose to enable PIN confirmation (preview) for one more user profiles.

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If the customer does not have a voice profile created and/or a profile PIN set up, they will be prompted to complete the set-up process before they can enable PIN confirmation for their linked skill account.

Use Skill Connections to Invoke PIN Confirmation

You invoke PIN confirmation (preview) from your custom skill by making a Skill Connections request to prompt the user for their PIN for verification as shown below:

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{
   "type": "Connections.StartConnection",
   "uri": "connection://AMAZON.VerifyPerson/2",
   "input": {
      "requestedAuthenticationConfidenceLevel": {
         "level": 400,
         "customPolicy": {
            "policyName": "VOICE_PIN"
         }
      }   
   }
}

In the above example, the Skill Connections request is made to the AMAZON.VerifyPerson/2 provider which handles the person verification task. In the task request input, the requestedAuthenticationConfidenceLevel object specifies level 400 with policyName “VOICE_PIN”. The “VOICE_PIN” policy ensures that the PIN confirmation (preview) verification strategy is applied for the associated AuthenticationConfidenceLevel. More on these fields is detailed in the full developer documentation linked below.

After the PIN confirmation (preview) task is completed, your custom skill will receive the results of the PIN confirmation (preview) in a SessionResumedRequest. Details on the response format and result codes are available as well in the developer documentation.

Get Started Today

Visit PIN confirmation (preview) for Alexa Skills documentation to learn more about how to get started integrating PIN confirmation (preview) for your skill experiences. If your skill supports personalization and account linking, we encourage you to apply for the preview today!

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