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Comment by silvanojr | Hacker News Reader

I was battling back and forth FOR A MONTH with their skill certification approval team for a skill update that would allow customers to call people by name, where in the first version it was only by phone number.

They would fail the certification because apparently people didn't know how to test, or used fake numbers to make phone calls and complained the call would not connect, or the certificate validation (that was working before) would fail, etc. All sorts of things. VERY frustrating process. I wouldn't make any change, submit the skill again for certification and get different results.

Now they announce their own calling feature, a week after finally approving our update.

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Kind of sad for you guys, but at the same time not so surprising - it is the fate of every useful platform add-on to be integrated into the platform over time. And calling people by name seems like a low-hanging fruit for Amazon.

Yes... also, when people started talking about an Echo device that could allow phone calls to happen I sent them an e-mail asking if we could have early access to develop our skill using the new device capabilities and asking if they had a beta program, their only response was: we don't comment on rumors.

Silly me.

That seems to be their MO for a lot of things. Mine product sales data to release their own Amazon version and take that extra margin. They do it here as well.

Amazon are strangling the Alexa ecosystem in other ways. They have a strangely parochial attitude to international usage. Phillipines? India? China? Japan? Germany? France? Russia? Korea? Forget it, you're not welcome to develop for this platform.

You can't buy one, and if you try developing for it, you can't test or demo anything that is location-based.

And this is why the Echo will ultimately lose the market to every other voice assistant.

Their skill approval system overall can use a bit more, ahem, intelligence.

No kidding. One of their test results was complaining that our skill was misunderstanding "my coworker" for "michael quicker". I had to reply to say that's just how Amazon sent us what Alexa understood.

Which skill might I ask? Does it work well?

RingByName

You need to link the skill with a RingByName account in order to use it. Yes, it works well. However, Amazon's speech recognition from Alexa is a challenge for names. Works fine most of the time for American names, but it struggles with foreign names. Results also vary depending on the accent of the user, so our skill always repeats what it got from Amazon to make sure users don't call someone else. We had to do some "magic" in the backend to try to find a contact even though an exact match wasn't found, which works very nicely.

Well we're getting rid of our foreigners so that problem will go away.

If you get rid of foreigners even Amazon will go away :)

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