Voice Weekly Issue 1: August 03, 2018

by Andrey Esaulov

A free, once–weekly email roundup of Voice news and articles.
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Things Every Alexa Skill Should Do: Use Analytics to Make Enhancements: This is an installment of the new series Amazon is starting called Things Every Alexa Skill Should Do, which highlights the important features and lessons that every skill builder can use to make their skills more engaging for customers.

Best Practices to Make Your Alexa Skills Eligible for Amazon Promotion: It's all about High customer engagement, Great customer experience, Fresh content and High reliability. Great Skill examples as best practices.

Request Permission and Access Contact Information with the New Customer Profile API: Now Skill developers can request following information from the customers: Full Name, Given Name (First Name), Email Address, Mobile Number. Skills using this feature today: SnapTravel, KptnCook Recipes, and Thalia Buch-Tipps (Hey, Germany!).

Developer Tools to Help You Build Alexa Skills: A nice selection of tools that will make your life as Skill developer better: Alexa Code Generator, Slotinator.io, Alexa Skills Kit Command Line Interface, Visual Studio Code, Alexa Simulator, Echosim.io, AirTable, Dashbot. We strongly think that BotTalk should be also on the list as it combines many features of the above tools in one solid platform.

The first Smart Displays with the Google Assistant are now available in stores: Definetly an attack on Amazon's Echo Show.

Stay on top of your day with proactive help from your Assistant: Visual snapshot of the day and suggestions for the new Google Actions to try.

Google Assistant support for Russian is starting to roll out: Definetly a right time to start the expansion on the Russian market, where the biggest local search enigne Yandex has just launched their smart speaker - Alice.

What People Ask Their Smart Speakers: Music 54.7%, News 39,1%, "How to" instructions 22.8%, Retail store hours or contact info 21.8%, Movies 21.5%, History 21.5%, Sports 20.1%, Science 16.6%, Restaurants 15.9%, None of the above 15.2%.

Voice Influencer Roundup on Voice Summit 2018 (Podcast): Bradley Metrock, Florian Hollandt, Michael Navat, Sophie Beckerman, Roger Kibbe, Marisniulkis Lescaille, Michael Novak, Heidi Culbertson, John Kelvie, Bahubali Shete, Ilana Shalowitz, Tahsim Ahmed, Jon Myers, Nick Schwab, Adva Levin, Pete Erickson. WOW!

Introducing VoiceCommerce.js: VoiceCommerce.js is a JavaScript library that makes it easy for developers to build Alexa Skills and Google Assistant Actions for Vue Storefront stores.