
What Amazon's Alexa economy pays the people building its skills - bcaulfield
https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-alexa-economy-echo-speaker-google-assistant-siri/
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SwellJoe
I wish I was surprised that these platforms are moving more and more toward a
sharecropper existence for developers. The mobile app ecosystems for iOS and
Android are bad enough; you have very little control, but at least you know
the terms when you sign up and if people buy/use your software, you get paid
something for it (if you choose to put a price on it). It sounds like for this
market, Amazon pays you whenever and whatever they feel like, down to and
including "never" and "nothing".

~~~
amelius
Platforms should be utilities. We can't really do without them, and there
should not be too many of them for practical reasons. But use them, and we
risk giving one or few players all the power. Also platforms give rise to
internally regulated markets, and it's one thing if the government regulates a
market, but yet another if a company regulates it.

I'm guessing we need special economic rules for platforms, or governments
should own them.

~~~
droopyEyelids
One of the worst aspects of this, to me, is when the platform company affords
its own apps access to APIs apps from the platform aren't allowed.

As an example consider Apple Pay Cash. It grabs anything you send in the
messages app with a dollar sign, and converts it to glittery text that prompts
you to pay whoever you're talking to.

Aside from the question of whether that feature is useful to you, it's such a
bullshit, cheating way to undercut Square Cash and Venmo.

They're exploiting their position to make an unfair playing ground. Feels so
gross to me.

~~~
SwellJoe
The deck is stacked at every turn, which is dangerous. The sad thing is that
I've always had sort of a belief that "more open wins in the end", but that
hasn't really been borne out in the mobile space. Apple and Google have built
walled gardens where they always have the advantage in any space they want to
operate in (even moreso than Microsoft during its rise to dominance, though
they're slightly more subtle about how they wield that advantage to kill
competitors). It's pretty much a battle of good vs evil all over again, and
evil is winning. It's alarming that new markets are even worse. I haven't
looked into the voice apps market for alternatives to Alexa, but I assume if
Amazon thinks they can get away with acting this way, the rest of them are the
same or worse.

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naturalgradient
I think developers and really anyone dealing with Amazon needs to understand
that there are no 'win-win' business relationships with Amazon. If you win,
Amazon will try to take it away from you eventually.

~~~
SteveCoast
I started to build a thing (maybe an OpenAlexa) for this reason (glider5.com)
- the goal was to eventually hook it up to STT and TTS and have it answer
queries, with all the code being open. Right now it kind of looks like a
dysfunctional wolframalpha - but where anyone can write the code to answer
queries.

Not sure whether to just kill it or do something else with it, but it was a
fun idea.

~~~
aluhut
I've been playing with Mycroft and Jasper before for the purpose of having an
assistant running on a PI but I stopped for different reasons. There is a need
for a OpenAlexa assistant out there for privacy aware customers. My gf is
pretty excited with the stories emerging around her friends who got Alexa. I'm
pretty sure this will expand as an assistant becomes normal. But I don't want
to have a Amazon employee at home.

[https://mycroft.ai/](https://mycroft.ai/)

[https://jasperproject.github.io/](https://jasperproject.github.io/)

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foobarbazetc
Alexa skills are weird in that Amazon is supposedly selling lots of Echos but
our skill has something like 500 active users when our mobile apps are in the
1M+ active range.

We have no idea why skill usage is low. It’s a really good skill. The major
complaint seems to be having to use our app name to activate it but we have no
control over that.

~~~
vidarh
What does it do?

I use my Alexa's (3 of them around the house so far) many times a day, but the
thing is, there are only so many things I want to speak out loud. It's
exacerbated by having to go in "blind" \- I'm not going to remember the
incantations to get a response out of dozens of skills, so they - including
the name - need to fall _very_ close to something I'd naturally say.

Overall, I mostly rely on the smart home stuff, basic searches, music, and
_one_ extra skill for local travel.

I can't see myself opting to use skills over my phone, tablet or laptop for
all that many other things. The above is _enough_ to make me enjoy having them
accessible everywhere in the house, so I'll probably augment my existing ones
with a few Dot's.

It also doesn't help that there really is a lot of junk skills around. E.g.
finding one that reliably provide bus times near me _and_ that has a
sufficiently good interface was a pain. There might very well be other skills
out there that do a better job, but I simply don't have time to spend going
through it. Good curated collections would help a lot.

~~~
GVIrish
I think Amazon (or Google) needs to solve the problem of skill discovery. I
would love to be able to ask Alexa, "What do you know about X" and it could
respond with a list of skills or categories of skills so I could at least know
where to look.

Even better if I could connect Alexa to a Fire Stick and have it visually
display results of a skill search to help me navigate and drill down.

------
thisisit
Are there any good resources/tutorials for someone who wants to learn how to
build these "Amazon skills"/Google Home apps?

~~~
kragubathy
Here's one :
[https://www.youtube.com/dabblelab](https://www.youtube.com/dabblelab)

Full Disclosure - I work at this company! :)

~~~
andybak
Any written tutorials? I've never understand the preference for video for
coding tutorials. (It's actually the speaking more than the video I dislike.
Or rather it's the enforced pacing that time-based media impose on you.)

~~~
jasonlotito
Some people prefer classrooms rather then books. Videos work like that, except
you can speed up or pause the video. You can also easily skip around to the
topic that interests you, and you'll easily see how long it takes to learn.

Videos also show you how it works and how it's done. Books cannot do that by
mere fact that they are static pages. They can describe and have screenshots.

Hopefully this gives you a better understanding why some people prefer video
over text for everything.

~~~
andybak
Makes sense. I can't stand classroom learning either.

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zitterbewegung
To be honest skills have no easy monetization path if at all.

I’m not even sure skills really need to exist for anything that only uses the
Alexa UI. For IOT devices it makes sense . The big issue is that you cant
purchase skills and to get to using a skill is time consuming.

I made a skill called history facts and I don’t even use it. I never use
skills at all.

~~~
slantyyz
Most of our use of Alexa revolves around skills. But they are all around smart
home products we have like Wemo, Harmony Hub, etc.

The bugbear I have (being a Canadian user) is the region lockouts. A lot of
existing skills aren't ticked for English (Canada) support, so we're stuck
waiting for skills to show up.

I contacted some product companies for some skills I was waiting for, and it
didn't even seem like companies were notified of the region setting or the
recent Canadian release.

~~~
chairmanwow
This is a truly unbelievable oversight on Amazon's part. Bad UI is almost
certainly to blame for something so silly.

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crsv
On a side note - navigating and consuming content on cnet's site has to be one
of the most painful experiences on the web. Slow and ugly only begin to
describe it.

~~~
jayliew
Agreed. I saved the CNET URL to my GetPocket app and then j st read it from
there. It cut out all the other bullshit

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michaelbuckbee
The article mentions my favorite Alexa skill: Jeopardy. It's a testament to
how well the hardware + voice recognition works that you can reasonably play
through 12 trivia questions daily with only minor hiccups.

It's not multiple choice, you just answer with whatever phrase makes sense and
it mostly just _works_ (which still strikes me as fairly amazing).

~~~
francisofascii
That sounds much better than the other trivia games I have tried, which have
been pretty awful, and reflect poorly on Alexa. They seem to fit a 5 question,
multiple choice template.

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gridit
Wolfram Alpha debuted in 2009. Just imagine what they could have been if
they'd opened up "skill" creation to the public.

Given that devices equivalent to Alexa or Google Home could pretty much be
launched on Kickstarter, is the ecosystem large enough to allow an open-source
or more public version of the AI assistant? Is it needed?

~~~
cepth
Wolfram Alpha actually has a pretty significant collection of “widgets”
([http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/](http://www.wolframalpha.com/widgets/)).
These are commonly embedded on math and science related pages. The more clever
widgets take full advantage of Wolfram Alpha’s NLP abilities.

As to why they didn’t have Alexa-style voice skills, I’m not sure speech
recognition is a core competency of the company.

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mkane848
Remind me again why programmers haven't started unionizing and working
together more to push back against this kind of shit

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bowmessage
Why is there a featured picture of a developer posing with a Google Home?

~~~
bob_theslob646
It was a Dev from Ibm who used to develop for Alexa, but with its'
unpredictable payouts , he has spent more time on the Google Home platform
which allowed him to advertise his books through Google AdSense.

~~~
bowmessage
Oh, thanks! Couldn't find anything about it in the article.

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laktek
If anyone looking to build Alexa skills by converting existing content from
websites, you might find [https://page.rest](https://page.rest) useful.

------
EADGBE
When I created my skill I created it for myself. The free t-shirt for being
one of the first 1000 skills was a bonus.

Even though it has a glaring bug, it still gets more traffic than any of my
other personal projects. And Amazon (usually once a year around December)
offers $100 credit which I can apply to my AWS account for the traffic it
incurs (which still costs me nothing).

~~~
EADGBE
Correction, it _doesn 't_ have a glaring bug. More people than I imagined are
just really bad at music ear training.

Aren't reviews just the best?

------
horatiocain
Virtually nothing

------
lkrubner
The article says that the Alexa economy is increasingly important to Amazon,
yet if you go on the developer boards, most of the complaints from last year
are still there. The flaws in the system keep serious developers away. Those
on Hacker News might remember this conversation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10876409)

It's also disappointing how much of this system remains vaporware:

[https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-
ces-...](https://www.theverge.com/2016/1/7/10719202/amazon-alexa-
ces-2016-takeover-smart-home)

It's also disappointing that Amazon continues to resist the changes necessary
to make the Alexa a good Enterprise eco-system:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-
pr...](http://www.smashcompany.com/business/the-amazon-echo-will-primarily-
succeed-in-business-settings-not-in-home-settings)

On this last point, it is frustrating that we have not seen more competition.
Most startups lack the resources to build their own voice system, so they want
to build on the back of service being offered by Amazon or Apple or ...

Apple promised to open Siri, but so far you can't build Enterprise apps with
Siri.

There is interest among managers. Among the ideas that business leaders have
asked me about:

1\. An Amazon Alexa in every hotel room, ready to answer guests questions

2\. A salesperson leaves a meeting where they made a sale. They get in their
car and drive home. They talk to their ______ device and all of the data is
sent to Salesforce, the app creating a new Opportunity or new Tasks.

3\. An Amazon Alexa skill that can reach into the companies Salesforce account
and generate a report for high level executives

Of this last one, we had a working demo in early 2016, but we need some extra
tools for specifying the phonetic sound of a company name, as Alexa mangles
the names of companies such as IBM and CNET.

As to #2, we worked on a text interface for Salesforce in 2015. I wrote about
that extensively here:

[https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/09...](https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-
Steps/dp/0998997617/)

We then investigated how to do this with voice. At the moment, it seems the
best option is to use voice-to-text on an iPhone or Android. It's an open
question whether it is best to use IBM Watson's NLP tools or build a
specialized tool just for dealing with Salesforce.

~~~
callalex
For your Salesforce bridge, have you checked out something like Twilio
Understand? It helps you build a back-and-forth conversation and makes it
easier to capture user responses as structured/templatised data.
[https://www.twilio.com/understand](https://www.twilio.com/understand)

------
mlchild
Shameless plug: I’m the co-founder of a company building entertainment & games
on Alexa and we’re hiring node.js engineers in SF Bay.

We are seed funded and looking to continue growing our user numbers and team,
email me if you want to hear more!

~~~
djrogers
Honest question - why would you do this? Without any possibility of direct
revenue for any skills you build, what’s the motivation? It seems that all
you’d be doing is enriching the Alexa ecosystem out of your own pocket.

~~~
mlchild
There is very much the possibility of direct revenue, stay tuned

