An Ultimate Guide On Amazon Alexa Skill Certification

Life has become much easier with Alexa hands-free devices. You speak to a smart thingy, and it does your biddings. You simply say, ‘Alexa, play my favorite music from the ’90s.” In a matter of seconds, you are listening to some of your cherished hits without clicking your mouse or typing your on keyboard!  

The Amazon market is growing by leaps and bounds. Now Amazon Alexa is used by 3,500 brands worldwide, has 50,000 skills, and has been integrated with 20,000 devices.

Amazon Alexa skill development is a big hype of today’s IT revolution. It will continue to expand exponentially. Companies are highly interested in investing in this area.

Our blog has discussed topics related to The basics of Alexa skill development, its creation and benefiting from it.This post we’ll dedicate to Amazon skill certification. Simply put, we’ll discuss how any skill can pass the certification process to get published. Well, let’s get started!

The Certification Checklist to Publish Your Alexa Skill

Developers make sure your skill meets certain certification requirements to reach Amazon Alexa users. The following diagram shows the stages of this development process:

Alexa developers assist you not only in coding but also in getting an initial certification and publishing your skill. Here is what the certification process looks like:

1. Our company’s experts ensure your skill meets the Alexa policy guidelines. These guidelines help check if it is appropriate for all customers. For instance, the skill won’t be accepted if it contains excessive violence or promotes terrorism, etc. Following these regulations helps protect Alexa users’ privacy and welfare.

2. Additionally, we make sure your skill meets the Alexa security requirements. This is necessary to protect your customer’s personal data (i.e., personal information cannot be gathered from end users unless they are legally notified). Furthermore, personal information encompasses a number of points: your full name, home address, email address, date of birth, and telephone number. 

If your skill allows unlocking a device, then Amazon requires the user to set up a voice code consisting of four digits for this specific function. If you are not willing to set up a voice code, we can provide an opt-out option. For customers who don’t set up a voice code, we offer limited functions.

3. We make every effort for your skill to meet content guidelines as well. If your company’s business deals with media content, we can create a flash briefing skill for it. It may be designed to give a quick overview of news and content for customers. It also provides Alexa customers with news headlines, etc.

Typically, a flash briefing skill can become a part of an end user’s daily routine. They can invoke the flash briefing skill by asking Alexa-enabled device things like:

Our developers make sure that your new skill complies with Amazon content guidelines by:  

• Verifying that it is not a copy-and-paste of an audiobook experience.
• Making sure it is not a rip-off of someone’s else music.
• Verifying that none of your feeds in your flash briefing skill is a copy of someone’s else audiobook experience.
• Checking that none of your feeds in your Amazon Alexa skill emulates a music streaming service.

4. Developers also run all the necessary functional tests. These tests verify that the information in the Alexa App matches the functionality of your app. To be specific, the functional tests are intended to check if:

• The skill’s basic functionality information matches information from the detail card of the Amazon Alexa App. We give this information on the Distribution Page for the skill on the developer console.
• The skill’s basic functions are operable and send useful home cards to the Amazon Alexa App.

5. Furthermore, we run all the required voice interface and user experience tests. These tests check the quality of your voice user interface. Interacting with a voice interface is something many people are still unfamiliar with. We endeavor to give your Amazon Alexa a robust interface (i.e., useful prompts making it feel like a natural conversation).

These tests help solve several tasks:

• Testing the user experience to find out if the skill is in alignment with several features of Alexa (it is done to create a satisfactory customer experience).
• Enhancing the various ways end users express requests to your skill.
• Measuring if the speech can be easily recognized when using your skill (can Alexa recognize the right words?)
• Improving language comprehension (when Alexa recognizes all the right words, does she understand how to act and what to do?).
• Making sure that users can speak to Alexa with different levels of fluency and spontaneity.
• Verifying that Alexa grasps the majority of your requests within parameters of your skill’s functionality.
• Ensuring that Alexa’s feedback to users’ requests is appropriate (i.e., either Alexa fulfills requests or explains why she can’t).

6. If your skill has screen-based interaction, then we run tests to verify it meets these requirements. For example, such Alexa-enabled devices as Echo Show, Echo Spot, Fire TV Cube, Fire HD 8, and Fire HD10 with the screen – allow computer engineers to make skills that utilize both voice and screen interaction. Our developers create screen displays and interactions with the help of templates and the Display interface.

Wrapping up:

Certification guidelines help prepare an Amazon Alexa skill for publishing. End users demand skills that are cooler and more advanced. Our Alexa engineers know how to use the Alexa skill kit to make a final product stand out. Shrewd business people understand how a new Amazon Alexa skill can benefit their business. What about you?

We’re ready to help you complete the certification of your Amazon skill in no time and with a good outcome. Contact us if you feel like discussing the certification process in greater detail.

Content created by our partner, Onix-systems.