How To Troubleshoot Issues When Invoking Your Live Skill
If your skill has been published to the Alexa Skills Store, it should be publicly available for your customers to enable and invoke. However, after enabling your skill for the first time, you may notice issues connecting to it successfully when invoking it on your Alexa-enabled device. You may be worried that your customers are experiencing this issue as well. This blog will help you identify the possible cause of this problem and help ensure your customers are able to invoke your skill. Please see the following steps:
In order to be able to interact with a skill, the marketplace of your Alexa app must map to an existing language version of the skill. For example, if your skill is built in English (US), your Alexa app must be associated with alexa.amazon.com. Please note that Alexa considers "English (US)" to be separate from "English (CA)". You can find which marketplace you are associated with by following the steps below:
1. Open the Alexa app
2. Click on the "More" button in the lower navigation bar
3. Click "Settings"
4. Scroll all the way down and click "About"
5. Under "Host Name", you'll see a value (for example "alexa.amazon.com", "alexa.amazon.ca", etc.)
| Alexa App Host Name | Skill Language Version |
|---|---|
| alexa.amazon.com.au | English (AU) |
| alexa.amazon.ca | English (CA) |
| alexa.amazon.in | English (IN) |
| alexa.amazon.co.uk | English (UK) |
| alexa.amazon.com | English (US) |
| alexa.amazon.ca | French (CA) |
| alexa.amazon.fr | French (FR) |
| alexa.amazon.de | German (DE) |
| alexa.amazon.it | Italian (IT) |
| alexa.amazon.co.jp | Japanese (JP) |
| alexa.amazon.com.br | Portuguese (BR) |
| alexa.amazon.es | Spanish (ES) |
| alexa.amazon.com.mx | Spanish (MX) |
If your account is associated with an Alexa language version that the skill does not support, and if you are the skill’s developer, the simplest solution is to add that language to your skill. Take a look at the Add a Language to an Existing Skill documentation.
If your skill is built in English (US), you’ll need to set English (US) on your Echo Device. See Change the Language on Your Echo Device. If you use English (US) skill on your mobile, make sure your phone language is also set to English (US). If your phone language is set to any other region, there might be issues while using the skill.
It’s possible that your Alexa app and Amazon Echo device(s) are signed in under different Amazon.com accounts. Note that when an Echo device is purchased, it's automatically associated with the Amazon account used to purchase it, which may be different from your development credentials. To ensure that that's not the case, deregister your Echo device and set up the device within the Alexa app using the following documentation:
Users can invoke Alexa custom skills by using a phrase supported by the Alexa service in combination with the invocation name for a custom skill to request information, ask a question, or tell Alexa to do something. For example, "Alexa, ask Daily Horoscopes for the horoscope for Gemini". If you don’t follow a supported phrase, your skill may not be invoked successfully.