Last week, Alexa Live 2020 took place online to launch a huge 31 new features. Updates were split between changes the users will see, such as quick links and others designed for us developers, such as APL for audio.
Out of the 31 we’ve picked the big three and made a quick video to explain each one.
Quick Links
Quick links give users a link to click on and then open a Skill by “sending” it to your smart speaker. This feature should help tie up marketing campaigns to promote skills and best of all, it’s possible to track different links to work out which method generates the most openings of your Skill.
The user will need to be logged into their Amazon account for this to work, but as you can see below the steps are simple and easy to use for the user.
Alexa Conversations
Alexa Conversations will help us to develop skills where multiple pieces of content need to be gathered, for example, a flight search or creating a custom training schedule. In the past we would need to code this from scratch, handling states, dialogue management to get all the required slots and allow the user to make changes. With Alexa Conversations much of this process is handled by Alexa.
Name-free interaction (NFI) Toolkit
The Name-free Interaction toolkit is an update to previous work from Alexa to try to help with Skill discovery. This update allows Skills to request five other phrases the skill can be opened with, so the user doesn’t need to remember the name of the skill. Skill using this have seen a 15% uplift in conversations.
31 is a large number to cover, so if you are interested in the full list head over to this post on the Alexa Website.